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Reviewed by Viga Boland for Readers' Favorite
The Snake Woman of Ipanema by Lucille Bellucci is as scary as its title suggests. So if being drawn into a world of evil spirits, spells, and horrifying rituals is your type of late night reading, The Snake Woman of Ipanema will keep you turning pages and, most likely, keep you awake as well. Lucille Bellucci opens her novel mysteriously at a company cocktail party in Rio, where all the beautiful people wear their best faces, phony smiles, and engage in flattering chatter laced with innuendo. All is not well between Maggie and her executive husband, but one must keep up appearances. As Maggie unravels over her husband's philandering with beautiful women, for which he is forever sorry and promises never to do again, when she learns his promiscuity has given her syphilis, she becomes totally unglued. Armed with a bit of information from her devoted maid, Tonia, and desperate for a cure, Maggie gets lost in the frightening forests of spiritual healers, omens, snakes, chants and rituals. Together with her frantic husband, the reader is drawn into a world with which many are unfamiliar and might prefer never to know.
In preparation for this review, I decided to research Lucille Bellucci and came across a very interesting interview with her on YouTube. Just search the title, The Snake Woman of Ipanema, and you will find it. It's well worth watching as Lucille explains what gave birth to her idea for this, her fifth book. Lucille is very familiar with the cultural and spiritual environment she portrays in The Snake Woman of Ipanema. Just like Maggie and her husband, Lucille and her husband lived in Brazil on a corporate level. What she describes, even at the cocktail party that opens the book, is obviously based on her own experience at such events. The spiritual practices she introduces readers to are what she learned about, and later researched more fully to give this book its credibility. What she has written into a psychological fiction horror story could really happen. As she says in the video, there are things out there that we don't understand. Someone should purchase the movie rights to The Snake Woman of Ipanema by Lucille Bellucci. Just don't watch it when you're home alone. Chilling!
