The Passion of Dolssa

PRINTZ HONOR AWARD WINNER • In this “gorgeous and evocative” (The New York Times) historical fiction novel from the award-winning author of Lovely War, two young girls fight to protect each other from a vindictive friar.<BR><BR>“A tense, moving portrait of these two teenage girls and their struggle to survive against insurmountable odds.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review<BR><BR>“A beautiful and timeless tale of family and loyalty, friendship and devotion.”—Mette Ivie Harrison, bestselling author of The Bishop’s Wife<BR><BR>Dolssa is a young gentlewoman with uncanny gifts, on the run from an obsessed friar determined to burn her as a heretic for the passion she refuses to tame. <BR><BR>Botille is a wily and charismatic peasant, a matchmaker running a tavern with her two sisters in a tiny seaside town. <BR><BR>The year is 1241; the place, Provensa, what we now call Provence, France—a land still reeling from the bloody crusades waged there by the Catholic Church and its northern French armies. <BR><BR>When the matchmaker finds the mystic near death by a riverside, Botille takes Dolssa in and discovers the girl’s extraordinary healing power. But as the vengeful Friar Lucien hunts down his heretic, the two girls find themselves putting an entire village at the mercy of murderers.