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The Marriage Portrait
By Maggie O’Farrell
Vintage Books, 9780593315088. July 2023, 352 pp.

The Short of It:

Marriage can be hard, especially when your husband wants you dead.

The Rest of It:

Florence in the 1550s. Marriages are carefully arranged to preserve
status, to guarantee the continuance of the family line, and sometimes, attraction is taken into consideration. But in The Marriage Portrait, young Lucrezia stands in for her sister who passed away right before her wedding. Lucrezia is just a child. Far too young to be married so her nurse manages to delay their joining for a short while, but Lucrezia doesn’t want anything to do with any of it. She just wants to roam her childhood home, drawing and painting her natural surroundings.

As much as she fights it, her parents fully support the union and what it will mean for their family. Lucrezia is young but once she becomes a woman, she should be able to produce many heirs which is what her future husband Alfonso is counting on. But we learn very early on that Lucrezia will not survive this marriage and what unfolds is an unputdownable story.

I enjoyed O’Farrell’s previous book, Hamnet so when it came time to choose another book for book club I chose The Marriage Portrait and it did not disappoint. It’s full of beautiful passages, and centers itself around art and beauty, even with the threat of something darker lurking in the background. The characters are well-developed and although the story is based on true events, O’Farrell gives Lucrezia the ending that she wants her to have. It’s very well done and now I’ve added all of O’Farrell’s books to my Libby list.

Highly recommend.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

The Sympathizer
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press,9780802124944, 2016, 384 pp.

The Short of It:

Thrilling, at times funny, but relentlessly fast-paced.

The Rest of It:

Many books have been written about the Vietnam war. We’ve all seen our share of movies too about the subject. The Sympathizer is different in that it’s narrated by a double agent. Building a life with refugees in Los Angeles, he also reports back to his communist superiors in Vietnam.

The story is told in jarring episodic bursts of storytelling. At one point, I had to go back to make sure my Kindle did not jump to another book because all of a sudden the characters are engaged in making a movie about the Vietnam experience. This was a very weird, surreal part of the novel. The portrayal of the events and how the the Vietnamese were represented was at once front and center, and also an afterthought.

The entire book is push/pull. Some events are highly detailed and graphic and then the author lures you back in through a comical interchange. It’s hard from me to describe the story because the frenetic energy of the storytelling keeps you moving forward even though you’re not sure what you just read! But, even though it seemed like work to keep things straight, I did enjoy the reading experience.

It should be mentioned that it’s won a ton of awards. Have you read it? There is a sequel out if you enjoyed this one.

Source: Borrowed
Disclosure: This post contains Indiebound affiliate links.

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