A Poetic Romance Set in the Year of the Great Fire of London
The Phoenix Bride
Historical Romance, Jewish Historical Fiction
Dell
March 12, 2024
EBook, Paperback, Audiobook
336
“Poetic, romantic, and steeped in seventeenth-century London, The Phoenix Bride is historical fiction at its best.”—Mackenzi Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue.
A passionate tale of plague, fire, and forbidden love from the acclaimed author of Solomon’s Crown.
It is 1666, one year after plague has devastated England. Young widow Cecilia Thorowgood is a prisoner, trapped and isolated within her older sister’s cavernous London townhouse. At the mercy of a legion of doctors trying to cure her grief with their impatient scalpels, Cecilia shows no sign of improvement. Soon, her sister makes a decision born of desperation: She hires a new physician, someone known for more unusual methods. But he is a foreigner. A Jew. And despite his attempts to save Cecilia, he knows he cannot quell the storm of sorrow that rages inside her. There is no easy cure for melancholy.
David Mendes fled Portugal to seek a new life in London, where he could practice his faith openly and leave the past behind. Still reeling from the loss of his beloved friend and struggling with his religion and his past, David is free and safe in this foreign land but incapable of happiness. The security he has found in London threatens to disappear when he meets Cecilia, and he finds himself torn between his duty to medicine and the beating of his own heart. He is the only one who can see her pain; the glimmers of light she emits, even in her gloom, are enough to make him believe once more in love.
Facing seemingly insurmountable challenges, David and Cecilia must endure prejudice, heartbreak, and calamity before they can be together. The Great Fire is coming—and with the city in flames around them, love has never felt so impossible.
“I shouldn’t say this,” he says, “but you look beautiful – as if you have risen from the flames.”
Natasha Siegel’s The Phoenix Bride is a romance set in a historical moment that you don’t see often think of when you think “romance”: London, 1666. Bubonic plague. The Great Fire. Yet this narrative fascinated me from beginning to end.
One year after the peak of the bubonic plague in 1665, main characters Cecilia and David meet. Both are suffering under the weight of grief and the uncertainty of their futures. Cecilia Thorowgood is a widow transplanted from the country to her sister’s townhouse after the plague killed her beloved husband. David Mendes is a Jewish doctor who fled Portugal in search of freedom and safety in London. He spent the previous year watching his patients, as well as his own loved one, die from the plague. They meet when Cecilia’s sister hires David to treat Cecilia’s lack of appetite, nausea, and nervousness. David, though generally unaccepted as a Jewish man, is known for more unconventional means of curing illness and so is hired as a last resort.
Cecilia has been kept under strict supervision by her sister and the multiple doctors she lined up to “cure” Cecilia of her grief. She hasn’t left the house since she arrived. She spends days only going as far as the garden in the back to walk around the linden tree. David, who recognizes that she is severely depressed, earns her trust over the course of a few weeks. He never forces treatment on her and slowly exposes her to more autonomy in her own care.
Mendes says, “Then this is my final prescription to you, Cecilia: freedom, in as large a dose as you can manage. Leave this awful house and go into the city. Find somewhere you enjoy being. Drink coffee, make friends, visit theaters. Live.“
“You say that as if it is easy.”
“It isn’t easy,” he says. “But it is possible.”
Siegel’s writing is breathtakingly beautiful. It felt like a weighted blanket; when held in only your hands, it seems too heavy to feel comfortable. Yet when spread out over your body, it’s like a balm to your soul. I let this story and Siegel’s writing drape over every part of me — my heart, my mind, my soul — and, as a result, I was soothed.
What I like better than anything else in this story are the depictions of mental health and neurodiversity. When Cecilia meets a neighbor, Sir Samuel Grey, they strike a unique and tender friendship because of their shared difference. Siegel writes an exchange between the two that I don’t think I’ll ever forget because of this vivid imagery:
“The physicians I have spoken with say I am afflicted with a permanent restlessness,” he tell me, apologetic. “My thoughts are like bees, swarming in my skull. Sometimes they fly out of my mouth without warning, and sometimes they buzz so loudly I can’t hear anything else at all. I fear afflicting someone with such madness without warning would be cruel.”
“It is not madness, surely,” I say with a flash of sympathy. I understand what it is to fear your own mind. “Only…difference.”
…
“You said your thoughts are like bees. Do they ever sting you?”
He cocks his head, eyes wide. He looks very much like his spaniel. “Why do you ask? Do yours sting you?”
“Yes, quite often.”
The romance between Cecilia and David was not the highlight of the story for me. I enjoyed Siegel’s descriptions of London and its history and Cecilia’s journey through her grief more than I did of the relationship between the two main characters. The story calls into question norms of sexuality and marriage in 1666 London. I just don’t know enough about that time period to make a call on accuracy, but I did find myself wondering while reading. My interest in these norms, as well as the extent to which the group of main characters found each other in their alterity, captured my attention more than the romance did.
The Phoenix Bride is a beautiful novel and one I would recommend to anyone who is looking for an atypical historical romance that is richly told and cuts right to the soul.
Celeste is a woman who is unwavering about certain things in life; three of those being books, cats, and cold brew coffee. If she can enjoy all three at the same time, it’s going to be a good day. Her favorite genres are fantasy or sci-fi romance, historical romance, and historical fiction but every few books she likes to mix it up with contemporary fiction, a good psychological thriller, or an inspiring memoir. She has a busy schedule working full-time for an online university but she makes sure to unwind each day with stories, either by reading to her elementary school-aged daughter or tucking herself in bed with her Kindle or the latest book she picked up at a local book store.
