A review by friendofgosig
Courtesans by Katie Hickman

3.75

Lots of this book was very interesting and on the whole it was well-written, but I felt that it wasn’t sure what it wanted to be. Structurally it covers the biography of five courtesans, but it is both more and less than that. The reason for this I think is just the fact that there is not that much evidence about some of the women she was writing about, and so a lot of time is spent describing the experiences of other women, and the men in their lives. Often the sources are limited to one or maybe two points of view for the whole biography, and though the author does acknowledge the bias in some of her sources, that does not really change the limitations to her vision.