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February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, clutching a suitcase and her father's cherished violin, leaves her small Italian village for a new home (and husband) halfway across the world in Argentina. Upon her arrival in Buenos Aires, Leda is shocked to find that her bridegroom has been killed. Unable to fathom the idea of returning home, she remains in this unfamiliar city, living in a commune, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. She finally acts on a passion she has kept secret for years: mastering the violin. Leda is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets.
Leda knows, however, that she can never play in public as a woman, so she cuts off her hair, binds her breasts, and, as a young man, joins a troupe of musicians bent on bringing tango into the salons of high society. As time progresses, the lines between Leda and her disguise will begin to blur, and feelings that she has long kept suppressed will reveal themselves, jeopardizing not only her music career but her life itself.
With evocative scenery, prose suffused with the rhythms of the tango, and a deep, resonant core, De Robertis delivers her most accomplished novel yet.
"Starred Review. There is something inherently alluring about the tango… [The Gods of Tango] captures that allure in a rich feast of history and human drama... Leda/Dante's strength of character finds a perfect home in De Robertis' strong narrative." - Booklist
"Starred Review. This beautifully realized work is as evocative and textured as the tango itself. De Robertis deserves to share fans with the likes of Isabel Allende and Julia Alvarez, not just for creating similar settings but for masterly storytelling." - Library Journal
"Makes for a poetic read, with De Robertis penning effortlessly lyrical sentences. The novel is true to its time and manages to be engrossing and believable... Beautifully written." - Publishers Weekly
"A plea to embrace 'the bright jagged thing you really are,' and De Robertis captures the enormity of that struggle." - Kirkus
"A sensuous and beautiful book, in which one woman's consuming passion for tango challenges convention, and shapes her identity. The Buenos Aires of the early 1900s is a vivid, dangerous place, and Carolina De Robertis takes us on an epic journey into its heart, and into the lives of the immigrants responsible for the birth of tango." - Saskia Sarginson, author of Without You and The Other Me
This information about The Gods of Tango was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Caro De Robertis is the award-winning and bestselling author of several books, including The Palace of Eros, The President and the Frog, Cantoras, and more. Their work has been translated into eighteen languages and has garnered numerous honors including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two Stonewall Book Awards, Italy's Rhegium Julii Prize, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary person to receive. De Robertis is also an award-winning literary translator and a professor at San Francisco State University. They live in Oakland, California, with their two children. Find out more at CaroDeRobertis.com.
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