Title: Not a balanced view of the Inquisition
Product review: A scholarly study published in 2004 found that, during the Inquisition, "Torture was rare and only about 1 percent of those brought before the Spanish Inquisition were actually executed."There may have been situations like the burning of 50 citizens in the town square, but they will have been rare.While I am a fan of Alice Hoffman's magical realism, this is not a book that I would recommend for an impressionable teen. It portrays every Christian in the story, except for the heroine's boyfriend, as rabid, hate-filled sadists. It's equivalent to portraying every German during WW II as sadistic murderers, which we know is not accurate. This is an extremely unbalanced view.A high point of the story is the heroine's bitter denunciation of the priest who has failed to protect the Jews in his church.Considering that Christianity is the last minority that intellectuals in the US now feel justified in attacking, I would not give this to a teen.
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