2.5/5
You know what? I was really looking forward to this book because a) I love Renaissance b) I enjoy reading book about powerful women in history, but unfortunately The Deadly Sisterhood failed to deliver coherent and strong stories despite the massive research the author so obviously undertook.

I've read a lot of biographies at some point in my life, and this one still comes to mind, because it absolutely blew me away.



Andre Maurois brought George Sand to life. She was a living, breathing woman to me, I fell in love with her and after that read everything I could find written by her. She was an astounding, powerful woman.

The Deadly Sisterhood reads like a dry recollection of many events with few interesting sparks in between. It's main failure is that it's disjointed - each woman's life is not a separate part of the book, - instead you just catch glimpses of them here and there among a huge mass of details, names and events dumped on us in between.

The second offense that made me struggle even more to engage in this book is that the recollection of events is not linear. The Deadly Sisterhood is separated into few time frames of Renaissance, that's true, but we are still jumping from past to present and back, and I think this could have been simply avoided by telling us about each woman separately. I think the effort to do so was there, but the author got buried under sheer amount of what happened, the interactions between the heroines of the book, their relatives and their husbands.

Regrettably I would not recommend this book, because I struggled to get through it. The only positive thing about my reading The Deadly Sisterhood was that it made me want to find out more about its formidable heroines. ( )

An unwieldy cast of characters drifts in and out of this book's chapters making it hard to keep track of them all, but that didn't stop me from enjoying the book once I adopted a more relaxed attitude. It's packed with 100 years of turbulent history told through up close and personal accounts of several prominent families, making the book as entertaining as a well written gossip magazine. I didn't know much about the Italian Renaissance before so the book was an eye opener for me. Italy at this time was a collection of independent kingdoms each with its own distinct culture and set of wealthy nobles who schemed among themselves for power.

Women are the focus of the book and though they didn't officially have a lot of political clout they managed to influence events anyway. One of the most dramatic examples came near the beginning of the book when Caterina Sforza, Countess of Forli, tricked her husband's assassins into allowing her to take refuge in a strategically placed fortress, giving her the means to run them off. When the mob threatened to kill her son if she didn't surrender Caterina stood on a high balcony and lifted her skirts to show them in the most graphic way that murdering her older children would be futile because she already had another on the way. The mob that hoped to overthrow her family fled. While all the women profiled had fascinating lives, that story stuck in my mind and every time Caterina came back into the narrative I sat up and paid special attention. ( )

On the surface, The Deadly Sisterhood: A Story of Women, Power, and Intrigue in the Italian Renaissance, 1427-1527 has all the hallmarks of a stellar non-fiction novel – infamous subjects, fascinating time period, biographer with experience. Unfortunately, the execution of the book leaves much to be desired, and it is difficult to figure out where the fault lies. The women’s stories are fascinating, but it takes too long for Ms. Frieda to get to them. What’s worse, the promise of a biography about these eight women is not 100 percent correct, as most of the tales are spent weeding through the machinations of the men in their lives rather than specifically about the women. This is the biggest disappointment, as there are other biographies written about one or another of the women mentioned that do concentrate solely on the women and their actions. In these more engaging biographies, the men in their lives are relegated to supporting roles or the stepladders used by the women to reach their powerful goals.

The writing itself fails to grab a reader’s attention. Again, while politics during the Italian Renaissance are extremely convoluted and do require some element of explanation, too many words are devoted to these explanations and not enough to the women’s lives. The details are methodical and frankly quite boring, while the constant intermarriages between families and almost nonstop warring, switching of allegiance, and failed partnerships muddy further complicate them. Ms. Frieda is never fully able to clearly explain politics in Renaissance Italy, and as a result is forever referencing or clarifying certain situations. This creates an unsteady pace, one in which the narrative falters and stops every time Ms. Frieda must back up the action and explain a situation in greater detail. In other words, just when the stories get good, the reader is forced to plod through yet another mind-numbing explanation of various family politics, feuds, and/or power grabs.

The problem lies not in the fact that detailed explanations are required in order for a reader to understand the mindset and power struggles of these women. Rather, the fault lies in the scope of the book’s subject. Including the stories of all eight women requires even more details and descriptions than would be necessary if only one or two were discussed and seriously detracts from the amount of words devoted to the subjects themselves. Had Ms. Frieda only focused on one or two of the women, the entire narrative would have been vastly improved because the focus would not be so large. Simply put, Ms. Frieda was too ambitious in choosing to write about eight amazing women, and she does each of them a disservice because she does not spend enough time focused on any particular one.

In general, The Deadly Sisterhood fails to live up to its promise. It is not so much a story about these eight fascinating and powerful women of Italy but rather a story about Renaissance Italy in which these eight women have a minor part. To add insult to injury, Ms. Frieda’s research appears rather questionable, as she uses as legitimate sources legends and urban myths of the kind that people love to share but have little to no basis in fact. In actuality, some of the rumors and myths she touts as fact are negated as falsehoods in other, similar biographies. In the end, it feels that Ms. Frieda wrote The Deadly Sisterhood to confirm such rumors and to titillate rather than to break new ground in biographical research. As such, the entire novel is a severe disappointment. Readers would be better off checking out some of the many other biographies about the Medici, Orsini, d’Este, Sforza, and Borgia ladies.

Leonie Frieda has taken on the task of portraying women of power from the Italian Renaissance. It’s a huge job, and, while she has meticulously researched the project, it falls a bit short.

Renaissance Italy was very different from the Italy of today. It was a loose collection of states ruled by dukes and counts who formed and broke alliances as it best suited them. The immensely powerful Catholic Church was corrupt. Intrigue, greed and war were the order of the day. With the men frequently away on military missions, the ruling of the states fell to their wives. Sometimes the men stayed home and sent their wives on diplomatic missions. Women may have been political pawns back then, but some of them managed to wrest power of their own. Isabella d’Aragona, Isabella and Beatrice d’Este, Catarina Sforza, Clarice Orsini, Lucrezia di Francesco Tornabuoni, and Frieda’s apparent favorite, Lucrezia Borgia, were women who did this.

To appreciate what these women did, one has to know the historical setting: the states, the families that ruled them, and how these families were all connected by intermarriage. A lot of the book is necessarily devoted to this. The women weave through story, born into this family, married into another, and, in some cases, into another and another. Thankfully, there are family genealogies in the front of the book so one can attempt to keep it all straight! The author doesn’t always refer to the people by the same name every time, adding to the confusion.

The most interesting thing to me was the author’s rehabilitation of Lucrezia Borgia’s reputation. Rather than the evil mistress of poison and pawn of her father, Rodrigo Borgia aka Pope Alexander, she is portrayed as an innocent, loving, woman of intellect and kindness. In fact, the whole Borgia family is described in a good light, something I never expected. Well, perhaps ‘good’ is pushing it; it’s more that they are all just products of their time.

Sadly, the women never really come to life. They remain flat, performing actions without us ever really knowing their feelings. It’s a pretty good history book, but not great on the biography part. ( )