Watermark
Vanitha Sankaran, . . Avon, $14.99 (331pp) ISBN 978-0-06-184927-5
Medieval France is no place to be born albino: when Auda emerges from the womb “undercooked” and “white as bone,” an ignorant healer's apprentice tears out the child's tongue to keep her from “spread[ing] the devil's lies.” Though her mother dies in childbirth, a small stroke of luck graces Auda's childhood: her father makes his living as a scribe and a papermaker, so she learns reading and writing to compensate for her inability to speak. Together, father and daughter work to make his experimental paper the new standard for France's writing stock (replacing parchment); against the odds, they field an order from the local
Reviewed on: 02/15/2010
Genre: Fiction