About this title: Tonio Treschi is the young heir to a Venetian fortune. After his brother has him kidnapped and castrated, Tonio becomes a singer, one of the Italian male sopranos known as the castrati, and determines to take revenge on his brother.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780345396938ISBN:0345396936
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. creasing and edge wear. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 576 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Date Published: 1988
ISBN-13:9781558171053ISBN:1558171053
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Light edge and corner wear. Cover has small tear near top seam. No marks. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: Abridged.
Binding: Audiobook cassette
Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780679443490ISBN:0679443495
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Ex-library. Nice 2-tape audio cassette set, lightly played, light shelf wear to plastic case, library stamps & stickers, stk #v9-9. 2 cassettes. Audience: General/trade. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Publishing Group, New York, New York, U.S. A
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780345396938ISBN:0345396936
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780345396938ISBN:0345396936
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Pages are clean; cover is beginning to fall away from the binding; cover shows wear at edges; spine is creased from reading. Mass market (rack) paperback. Glued binding. 566 p. Audience: General/trade. read more
"Cry to Heaven by Anne Rice is a story of a Renaissance noble's son from Venice that is forced into the life of a Naples castrato singer. Tonio (our main character) is forcefully castrated when his exiled father returns to Venice to claim his right as the Treschi heir. Tonio is shipped off to a conservatory where he decides to use his voice to get back at the man who denied his manhood. As his voice and reputation develop, Tonio starts to lose sight of his dream. Will he continue to be a singer and live with his new-found love? Or will revenge take hold of his every thought? I'd recommend Cry to Heaven for it's wonderful description and diverse character personalities. I'd also recommend it to people who enjoy historical fiction because for the most part, this book is historically accurate in the aura of the book and in character mannerisms. I wouldn't recommend this book to people with a closed mind to homosexual relationships (plus some explicit content)."
"this book was a roller-coaster for me. i was so enthralled at the beginning that i almost stopped reading it when tonio was emasculated. but i carried on only to be bombarded with gay sex (which was interesting for the first 10 times- i especially liked the cardinal's sins) and lots of what i would call filler. this book had a very rich story and i even enjoyed the conclusion but it could have lost the weight of maybe 200 pages.
this book did inspire me to learn more about the castrato (i even re-watched farinelli). i admit that i'm still confused about whether castrato were good lovers or not. the literature portrays them as the perfect partner (safe for the ladies and enticing to the men) but i have a hard time believing the lack of testosterone and maturity made them very worthy partners."
"There are interesting themes lurking in this book, themes of gender, and identity, and sexuality, and art and what we are willing to sacrifice for it, but, alas, these themes never did more then lurk. Rice, with her characteristically odd focus, never gives those things in her premise which are rich and fascinating anywhere near enough time to flower. I have little empathy for the reviewers here who rate this book badly out of distaste for its subject matter; I love unexplored corners of history, and when so much disgust greets even the mention of the castrati, they are likely to remain one of those corners for a long time. I wanted Rice to, in this narrative, bask in the glory of the Italian opera, write in tribute to the dubious, troubling moral values explicit in the mutilation (though mutilation it is not when it is consensual, but few times in this novel was it so. I do not put much stock in the high drama in the secondary plotline of this book, the very beginning, with the unwitting fate of the peasant boy with the beautiful voice whose parents had fallen on hard times...that I could believe, and easily) of young boys for the betterment of an extreme, demanding art.
But she does not. Instead, she spends her time on lurid family scandals that more fit the plots of one of those authors than a work of serious historical fiction (which I suppose this is not, but I like to be open minded), and on romantic relationships which are never carefully developed enough to be convincing. I did not want to hear about the drama of casting within the castrati's school; I wanted to hear, in richer and more convincing detail, what it was they were learning. The refusal of one of the characters to play female roles was fascinating, but I wanted more of a careful look at that, at the insecurity and nueroses that it comes from. I felt that Rice's insistence on not qualify that characterization choice was the product of a perspective firmly rooted in the modern era, when what we now call 'drag' is given a far different sort of recognition.
If I had reminded myself of Rice's proven failings, of her repeated inability to focus on the parts of her plotlines that I particularly find interesting, then I could have expected precisely all my dissatisfactions with this novel. Take that as a warning, those of you familiar with Rice's others work: this is as representative os anything, even if it has no supernatural elements."
"I read Interview with the Vampire when I was 15, and I was immediately hooked on Anne Rice for years after. I think the latent homosexuality of vampires has a fairly widespread gay following, and Anne Rice is the queen of indirectly-gay best-selling fiction. However, Cry to Heaven, a step away from the familiar vampire series, was not one of my favorite offerings by her. However, she paints a luxurious portrait of semi-ancient Rome, the sanctioned but never publicly talked about affairs between the eunuchs and the priests, and does a masterful job with her history, as always. A good book, simply not one of my very favorites from Rice."
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