The Marriage Portrait

I'm fairly obsessed with history so any chance I get to learn about a new person or time in history I'll take it and inhale it.

So on the one hand I enjoyed learning about Lucrezia and her short life, however I really struggled with the way this was written.

Another review summed my thoughts up perfectly - "the plot got lost in all the symbolism".

When the plot was plotting I was so into this, then it would veer off for pages and pages about paintings and animals and other things, which I sort of got the symbolism of those things but it was just SO much that it took away from the story.

It may just be the authors style (this is my first from her so I'm not sure) but there was some odd ways of describing events, saying something like "later she would recall that they did x, y and z" but it was in the middle of scene, instead of just adding a scene set later recalling the event. It was so jarring and stopped the flow of the narrative.

I ended up switching to audio part way through this and I'm glad I did, the narrator (Genevieve Gaunt) was great and I'm not sure I would have persevered if I hadn't.