In the mid to late 1400s, the new leader of the Medici family is having to come to terms with ruling and giving up the woman he loves to marry a woman from a high-ranking Roman family. Lorenzo is torn between love and power and making the right choices for the city of Florence. There are enemies from his family’s past and then those who have come out the shadows, trying to come for the young Medici’s neck.
Strukul’s writing of characters improved tremendously in this installment in the Medici trilogy. In the first book, I was connecting more so with the side characters than the actual Medici. Here, all the characters are enjoyable to read from and all so different, they are each going through their own thing, Lorenzo ruling a city, Clarice in a loveless marriage, Leonardo wanting to discover things that are against the church’s beliefs. This book really showed off how people were advancing during the renaissance. I liked that it did not paint the Medici like gods, no, they all had flaws and did make wrong choices at time. This book made historical figures into real people.
Atmosphere is made by descriptive writing, in my opinion. The reader really gets to see how Florence and Italy has changed from the first book. It is interesting to see how the politics of the leaders changed the republics around them as the series continued. This story takes place in the peak of the renaissance with a Medici and then Leonardo Da Vinci as two of its main characters.
The author has never lacked with his writing skills. In the first book, there might have been some errors in translation, but I did not see any of that in this installment. As stated before, Strukul is a descriptive writer, but he does not overdo it in anyway. This was fast and easy to read and if historical fiction is not your main genre, I still think that you would find this enjoyable. The dialogue was great as well, I really hoped it would be for the characters that the story focused on, I was not let down.
This is my favorite time in the Medici family history I was super excited for the plot of this book. This book only spans about ten years, yes, I would have liked to see more of Lorenzo’s “reign”, but I was not disappointed with what I got. I truly was not expecting to get Da Vinci as a point of view, and it was so interesting to see his thoughts on the Medici and his process of making his inventions and masterpieces. Lucrezia is one of my favorite characters on the Netflix series about the Medici, this book gave her so much mor depth though of how she was seen in Florence with Lorenzo and Leonardo. Clarice has not been someone in the family’s history that I ever connected with but her portrayal in this story was so much more harrowing than we usually see. Strukul does not paint the renaissance as this beautiful and bright time, he showed the hardships and violence that was happening as well. I think there could have been so much more added to the story like Giuliano, Botticelli, and Simonetta Vespucci but I understand the author did not want to linger too far from the facts and I respect that.
Strukul’s writing of characters improved tremendously in this installment in the Medici trilogy. This book made historical figures into real people. The reader really gets to see how Florence and Italy has changed from the first book. This story takes place in the peak of the renaissance with a Medici and then Leonardo Da Vinci as two of its main characters. The author has never lacked with his writing skills. The dialogue was great as well, I really hoped it would be for the characters that the story focused on, I was not let down. This book only spans about ten years, yes, I would have liked to see more of Lorenzo’s “reign”, but I was not disappointed with what I got. Although this did not feel like a five star, I still enjoyed my time reading this book. I will finish up the series next month, in April.
4 out of 5 stars.
Izzy Reads 