Dennis Wanebo

Boy of Heaven

Fiction

“This work tells the story of a seventeenth-century Italian orphan who happens to find a missing panel from Leonardo’s The Last Supper. It works quite well as the Leonardo mystery, as magical realism, and as fable telling. But the real gift for the reader arises from author’s one-off decision to create a language for this fable. Mr. Hoffman concocts a credible amalgam of the kind of baroque English writing that one might expect to stumble across in a dusty shelf at the British Museum of today—a book recounting a most strange occurrence in Italy during the early years of the Scientific Revolution. The boy’s story here dwells in the world of seventeenth-century Italy, and its attendant Catholicity. A world of bishops, brothers, friars, and nuns. A world of ancient superstition, casual brutality, and magic. A world which was soon to run headlong into Newton and Galileo. What a perfect interlude for this visit to an unforgettable boy and his tiny remuda of magical horses.”