Have you ever looked at someone else and though, why can’t I be like them? The ‘perfect’ friend or sibling that no matter what you do, you can’t compete with. They are always ‘perfect’ and so everyone ignores you, or so it feels? This is exactly how Isabel Evans feels in the fifth stravaganza book by Mary Hoffman, City of Ships. As Isabel tries hard to compete with her brother, while secretly despising the fact that she’ll never be good enough, she stumbles across a strange artifact. It’s a small red velvet bag full of mosaic tiles. When Isabel falls asleep with it, she finds herself in a parallel version of medieval Italy called Talia. Beautiful and dangerous, Talia captures Isabel’s attention, and not in a good way, when bad things start to happen.
Isabel is always comparing herself to Charlie. She’s a good student, but he’s brilliant; she is pretty, but Charlie is very handsome. Everything he does seems to make Isabel jealous. Their parents, however, pay the same attention to both and have never ‘liked’ one over the other, which Isabel thinks isn’t what they want to do. But Isabel has some good friends, like Ayesha, the girlfriend of book four’s hero, Matt. In coming to Talia she meets the other Talian stravaganti, Nick duke, Georgia O’Grady and Sky Meadows, who she has a silent crush on. But they can’t even help with what’s happening in her Talian city.
Isabel stravagates to the independent city-state of Classe. Classe is full of art and ports and merchants who sell many beautiful things. Flavia, Isabel’s stravaganti, is a merchant whose goods keep getting stolen by pirates. She teaches Isabel about the city, and Isabel meets some important people. The Duke of Classe, Germano Mariano, the last son of the Nucci family, Fillippo, the Cavaliere of Bellezza and their Duchessa, Luciano and Arianna. Also, she meets, if not at first then later, the whole Bellezan Stravaganti gang, including Rodolfo, Doctor Crinamorte and Silvia.
Bad things are brewing in Talia, though. The irrational Duke of Tuschia, Fabrizio di Chimici, is now placing a war upon his own country of Talia. He has made a pact with the Gate People, who live in the East and attack Talian vessels with pirates, to attack the cities of Bellezza and Classe. He figures that when the gate people win the war and take over those cities, they will just hand them over to Fabrizio. But others think that if he lets the Gate People conquer those cities, they won’t stop until they have all of Talia. The Grand Duke is also pushing a marriage unto his sister, Beatrice, to marry his cousin, Fillippo di Chimici. Beatrice doesn’t want to marry Fillippo, but she doesn’t want to disobey her brother, so she silently agrees, but she runs away soon after. The Duke’s brother, Gaetano, who is good friends with the Duchessa of Bellezza, tells Beatrice to go there. This actually might save the cities, though.
This book, so far, has probably my favorite beginning. All of this action happens in the first half, and I didn’t even mention some things. Like how Isabel gets kidnapped by a pirate named Andrea, who turns out to have a connection to one of the Stravaganti. It’s very exciting, and has a good pace. There aren’t as many places where I just want to skip ahead; I mainly want to keep reading so I can find out what happens next. Don’t skip either, when you read this, you will miss out on so many details that explain things. Oh, and if you haven’t had enough of Doctor Dethridge’s old English yet, there will be a lot more where it came from, especially later in the book(yes I read ahead, and you don’t want to miss my next post).
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