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Gr 6-9 An intriguing, intricately woven fantasy set in Italy and then Sicily. Because of his magnificent voice, Alfredo is selected to be trained as a choirboy. On his name day, he receives a mysterious gift, a gold charm of a salamander on a chain, from his father's estranged brother. Thus starts this complicated tale that relies on folklore related to salamanders as the spirit of fire and the power of music. After Alfredo is orphaned when his family's bakery burns down, the Prince-Cardinal begins to arrange for the painful and ...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

Mysterious Uncle Giorgio turns up in the nick of time: Alfredo's entire family has just perished in a catastrophic fire that consumed their thriving bakery, and now the cathedral priests are pressuring the boy to preserve his lovely singing voice by submitting to castration (a practice common in eighteenth-century Italy). Though Alfredo has never met his father's estranged brother, Uncle Giorgio claims him and spirits him away to the ancestral home on Mount Etna, where much is amiss, as Alfredo soon realizes. Fire is the key to Uncle Giorgio's being—not the tame, benign fire of a bakery oven but th...Log In or Sign Up to Read More