Book Synopsis:

In Verona, a city ravaged by plague and political rivalries, a mother mourning the death of her day-old infant enters the household of the powerful Cappelletti family to become the wet-nurse to their newborn baby. As she serves her beloved Juliet over the next fourteen years, the nurse learns the Cappellettis’ darkest secrets. Those secrets—and the nurse’s deep personal grief—erupt across five momentous days of love and loss that destroy a daughter, and a family.

By turns sensual, tragic, and comic, Juliet’s Nurse gives voice to one of literature’s most memorable and distinctive characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider among Verona’s wealthy ruling class. Exploring the romance and intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies, and losses only hinted at in Shakespeare’s play, this is a never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Verona—the love between a grieving woman and the precious child of her heart.

In the tradition of Sarah Dunant, Philippa Gregory, and Geraldine Brooks, Juliet’s Nurse is a rich prequel that reimagines the world’s most cherished tale of love and loss, suffering and survival. – See more at SimonandSchuster.biz.

Photo by John Melville Bishop

Author’s Bio:

Award-winning historian, author, and former college professor LOIS LEVEEN holds degrees in history and literature from Harvard, UCLA, and USC. She traveled to Verona, Italy, to research JULIET’S NURSE, as well as apprenticing herself to an urban beekeeping group in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, to write accurately about the life cycle of hives.

Lois has given talks in Finland, France, and throughout the US about the historical research behind JULIET’S NURSE, and about how she approached challenging themes of teen violence, suicide, and plague epidemics in adapting Shakespeare for contemporary readers. Her first novel, The Secrets of Mary Bowser, based on the true story of an African American woman who spied for the Union during the Civil War by posing as a slave in the Confederate White House, was a 2012 Target Book Club pick and is currently being developed into a Broadway musical.

Connect with Lois: Website  ~  Facebook  ~  Twitter

 

Where to buy the book:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Book Depository

Chapters Indigo

Author Interview

1. How did you do research for your book?

I read medieval cookbooks to plan meals, and medieval medical manuals to figure out how pregnancies, infertility, and breastfeeding would be handled. I did research on the impact of the plague, to understand how it continued to affect Italian society even after the initial outbreak ended. I read about fashion, which was key in this period not just in terms of what people wore but because fabric and clothing served as a kind of exchange commodity, the way we might think of currency or precious metals you would pawn or trade.

I traveled to Verona while I was working on the manuscript, and during my time there I took over 1,000 photographs just in one day. Understanding how a private house would be laid out, how frescoes would appear on the walls, what it would have felt like to move through a crowded medieval city—all of that relied on being there in person. But, of course, you have to be careful not to get so caught up in the research you forget about the story. The historical details work their way in, but ultimately the novel is about the characters, and what happens to them.
2. Was your motivation for writing Juliet’s Nurse based in any way to the fact that this year is the 450th anniversary of the birthday of William Shakespeare?

I wish I looked that far ahead! Finding a character whose story you want to spend several years living/writing is quite a challenge. One day the title “Juliet’s Nurse” popped into my head, and so I re-read Romeo and Juliet, and realized this was a great character whose story I wanted to create. But I did get to spend April in Paris, at a conference celebrating Shakespeare’s birthday. No one actually knows what day he was born, but on the day that is generally accepted as his birthday, I went to a reception at the home of the British ambassador to France. That was quite an honor.
3. Why did you write Juliet’s Nurse?

I was actually struggling with another novel that just wasn’t coming together, and the title “Juliet’s Nurse” came into my head. I knew the nurse was a comic figure in the play, but the truth was I hadn’t read Romeo and Juliet since high school. So I pulled my copy off the bookshelf, and discovered how incredibly complex and compelling Shakespeare made her. In her first scene in the play, we hear this amazing backstory: she had a daughter who was born the same day as Juliet but died. What was it like to lose one child, and then immediately take comfort in caring for another in such a physically as well as emotionally intimate way?

We also learn a bit about her husband, and how he interacted with Juliet. But what was he like? What was his relationship with Angelica, the nurse? Later in the play, Angelica describes Juliet’s cousin Tybalt as “the best friend I had,” which is odd because they’re not in a single scene together. So what was their friendship like? Even in the play, Angelica is an intensely emotional character, and I sensed that shifting the focus squarely onto her would tease out new aspects of this seemingly well-known story. And I’m very interested in what history I can learn as I work on my novels. Here was a way to think about women’s roles in late medieval and early Renaissance Italy, including women of very different class positions. So really, once the idea came to me, I couldn’t NOT write it.
4. What are you currently reading?

I’ve been rereading The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, which is so weird and smart, and whenever I read it I wish I could write like that. Before that it was The Table of Less Valued Knights, by Marie Philips, because we met at a book event in Toronto. Next is a manuscript a friend wrote that is not yet published, one of the perks of being a novelist! The rest of my current reading is research for my next novel, and the topic is still top secret, so you will just have to wait a while to find out … patiently, I hope!

My review will be coming very soon, but for now you can enjoy the book tour, interview, and giveaway.

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