I is for I, Iago

Welcome to today’s post for the A to Z Blogging Challenge. For each day, I’ll be sharing the opening paragraphs to a book that starts with that letter and is sitting on my shelves or my Kindle.

I, Iago by Nicole Galland

Paterfamilias

Prologue

They called me "honest Iago" from an early age, but in Venice, this is not a compliment. It is rebuke. One does not proper by honesty. One does not rise in the social ranks. One does not curry favors. Honesty causes upset, and Venice is serene. The Serene Republic. It says so right there on the seal of state, which i could read when I was two, or so claimed the governess who struggled to keep up with my precociousness.

I am the fifth son born into a family where even a second son is redundant. My eldest brother, Rizardo, learned the family business, which he would inherit someday, along with the family home and the family riches. The second-born, lacking all imagination, of course became a priest. The third and fourth did not amount to much: one died in infancy; the next made it to maturity with military aspirations, but when I was ten years, he wounded himself so severely in cadet training that he bled to death. An artillery man, he had been cleaning his ceremonial sword when it slipped from his grasp, and the blade gouged him deep near his groin.

So, what do you think? Read it soon or give it away?