Anne Rice demonstrates her power to enthrall the reader as she makes real for us the exalted and fearful life of an extraordinary society--the eighteenth-century world of the castrati, the male sopranos whose glorious voices, unmatched by any singers since their time, brought them the adulation of the royal courts and grand opera houses of Europe. This is a novel that charms, shocks, and moves us by its portrayal of passionate and fascinating lives, by its re-creation of a strange and exotic moment in history--and by the ways in which it considers, and adds resonance to, our deepest images of the masculine and the feminine. It is a mesmerizing feat of storytelling.