THE WARHORSE

A Renaissance-era story, hodgepodge but topical, about a lad whose dreams of glory in battle are shattered by its brutal reality. Defying his worried father, Lorenzo sets out for his Duke’s war camp, arriving just in time to witness a bloody, inconclusive melee, then to be wounded while defending a family of lepers from roving mercenaries. Later, he kills an attacker while making his escape. A competing plotline then muscles in, as Lorenzo falls in love with the unmarked but untouchable daughter of the lepers, and grows up to be a painter whose Virgin Marys all bear her face. Veteran illustrator Bolognese slips in occasional pages from the young Lorenzo’s sketchbook, and closes with a poignant, reunion, 20 years later, between the artist and his dying love. Notwithstanding the jumble of elements, and various severed limbs or splashes of gore, readers with weaker stomachs may prefer this to Michael Cadnum’s disturbingly vivid medieval tales. (afterword) (Fiction. 11-13)