From Incantation:
We lived in a tiny village in Spain. It is gone now, but then it was called Encaleflora, the name of the lime flower, something bitter and something sweet mixed into one. It was a town that had been my family's home for more than five hundred years, a beautiful village in the most beautiful countryside in all of Aragon.
It began on a hot day.
I was out in the garden when I smelled something burning. Not lime flowers, only pure bitterness. Cores, rinds, pits. That was the way it started. That was the way our world disappeared.
When Estrella arrives at the town square, she discovers the origin of the smell -- books. Soldiers are burning piles of books as an old man stands by and weeps. Estrella doesn't yet realize it, but the Spanish Inquisition has begun.
Her family is Catholic, though some of their habits and rituals are slightly different than those of other Catholic families. A stolen kiss and the jealousy of her best friend bring attention to how different her family rituals really are.
Little, Brown created a nice little edition -- like Hoffman's other teen novels, it's a narrow, smallish hardback. While I'm not crazy about the face itself (I think they were going for holy, but it ended up kind of quizzical), the cover is a shiny gold, and the artwork gains and loses depth depending on the light that hits it. People will want to pick it up for a closer look.
Incantation impressed me. Somehow, Alice Hoffman successfully melded romance and bitterness and jealousy and fear and bravery and love and violence and faith in less than two hundred pages. It'll be a good one for historical fiction and romance fans, of course, but also for the teens who have read every single Holocaust story out there and who maybe want to move along to a different tragic time in history.
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