An apprentice in a Florentine workshop wants to make the other boys laugh, so he goes to the angel in the courtyard, opens his forearm, and hands over everything he still recalls of his grandmother’s house: the rooms, the smell of it, whatever a boy of seventeen retains of a dead woman. In exchange he can make painted fruit look obscene. It works. The others are delighted. He does not miss the house, because he cannot. A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter is sold as a queer romance with Leonardo da Vinci in it, and it is that. The courtyard is what it is about.
The Angel Who Refuses Her Name
The angel is called Lupa, and only because the boy narrating the book offers her that word after she rejects the one a priest tried to hand her. It means she-wolf, and she likes it for the obvious reason.
She arrives feral, filthy and lice-ridden, uninterested in the arrangement she has been installed to service. She wants to know why people will eat a deer and not a dog. And she steals a cake so somebody in the house can have a birthday. There is a healed scar behind one ear, which ought to be impossible, and her magic ignores the account books. A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter builds a tidy system and then puts her inside it as the hole.
Cotter turns her, across four hundred pages, from comic relief into the novel’s moral centre without letting anyone make a speech. The question underneath her, whether a hungry thing can be blamed for hunting, is raised early, answered honestly, then handed back from the opposite direction. Groups who arrive for the romance will spend their evening on her.
What A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter Asks of Its Painters
The rules are simple; the consequences are not. An angel bound to a studio grants real magic, and the painter settles up in blood and in portions of his own life: a day, a season, a decade, or a memory he will never know has gone. Each transaction leaves a black mark on the skin. Small debts are excellent value. Large ones are not.
The narrator has both arms covered. He is seventeen, his father died leaving the family house mortgaged to the Medici bank, and his mother and two sisters live on whatever his hands earn, so those hands must beat everyone else’s, so he keeps signing. Nobody has added it up for him. When somebody finally does, the total left is under a year.
Florence has turned beauty into a competition between rich households, so demand never falls and nobody in the trade has reason to stop.
The One Bargain Leonardo Makes
The Leonardo of this novel is not a genius. He is a young man who cannot begin work to order. He misses every deadline, is set to sweeping floors, abandons an assigned fresco to draw a flying machine, and cannot hold his attention unless somebody else is sitting beside him. And he is frightened of blood and has never bargained, which in a studio of marked forearms makes him either a coward or the only honest person in it.
He makes exactly one, and its terms are withheld until the last possible moment. It is the boldest decision in A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter and the one most worth arguing about: he agreed to give up the memory of whoever he loves, in return for that person surviving. The closing chapters are a courtship begun from nothing, with only one of the two remembering.
Who Is Allowed to Bargain in A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter
Midway through, the agreeable magic turns into politics. The angels are demons, the ruling family has always known, and the bodies they walk around in belonged to Florentines killed to make them available. The Medici have run that trade for generations and called it a religious honour.
With that on the table the city reads differently. The church blesses the practice, the bank collects, the poorest are barred entirely, and the beauty everyone admires sits downstream of a supply of expendable people. The strongest scene is not a fight but a crowd in the slums, locked out of the only magic Florence is famous for, cutting themselves in front of an angel and begging her to take something.
A Household Balancing Its Own Books
The family scenes are quietly the warmest thing on offer. The mother sets plaster where the gemstones used to be so the neighbours will not notice, serves beans, and never asks where the marks come from. The clever fifteen-year-old negotiates her own marriage, on the grounds that if she is to be sold she would rather name the price. The younger sibling asks, late on, what is involved in changing a name, and is Emilo from then on, handled in two sentences and no anxiety at all.
Where A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter Runs Long
- Fifty-nine short chapters plus an epilogue, most ending on a hook, so the middle third feels written to be sold in instalments.
- The narrating voice has two settings, a rueful aside and an italic self-scolding, both charming for half the length.
- The descent into hell is the flattest stretch, a pity given that the narrator is named after Dante’s guide through it.
- The final act recovers too much of what it has just spent.
Groups wanting the same ground from another angle: Perspective by Laurent Binet puts a murder inside a Florentine workshop and tells it in letters; The Gentleman and His Vowsmith by Rebecca Ide makes magic a matter of contracts badly signed; The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang is the pick for the queer historical romance; and The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso for anyone gripped by memory as a removable thing.
For the Group
Open with the marks. Every painter in this city has visibly chosen a shortened life over mediocrity, and A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter treats none of them as foolish. Ask the table what it has traded for being good at something.
Then the ending. One character pays for another’s survival with his memory of loving him, then, within a single scene, begins getting some of it back. Is that mercy, or the book flinching? A group will split cleanly.
Then Lupa’s last move, which reframes everything since the courtyard. Does the novel earn it, or hand her a throne because the reader has grown fond of her?
A practical note, because the list is long. Magic is purchased with blood, so forearms are opened constantly and casually. A councillor is murdered in a public chamber while the narrator watches from under a table. Knife wounds, one fatal, and a body left out as a warning. The narrator ends his own life as a tactic to reach the underworld, framed as sacrifice; earlier, a recollection of standing on bridges after his brother disappeared. A woman is killed to make room inside her for something else, an abusive marriage behind her. A sibling is heard being tortured. A father’s cruelty is verbal but for one remembered occasion. Two love scenes keep the door largely closed.
Final Thoughts
Cotter is good on the unglamorous machinery of a fifteenth-century studio, and better on what it does to a young man’s sense of ownership: a painting passes through many hands and carries nobody’s signature, so the boy who cannot bear to pass his brush along is not being precious; he is admitting the magic has left his fingers.
Which is the argument, made with pictures rather than statements. The art that matters in A Dangerous Bargain by Erin Cotter is uniformly bad art: a child’s drawing of two foxes, bought for one coin; a lopsided homemade locket; a row of clumsy finger-paintings hung along a garden wall for a man who has forgotten who made them. Then an epilogue, decades later: two old masters leaning over a portrait of a merchant’s wife, touching something to her mouth, asking her to come home. The door opens. It is a wonderful last page, and the novel around it is a dozen chapters too long.
A note on provenance, in the spirit of a book that itemises everything: this copy came from Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, entered in the ledger as one review copy, terms payable in honest opinion. Nothing was deducted in blood and no years were taken. The apprentices here would call that a suspiciously generous commission and hunt for the small print. There is none.