Artsy and crafty

Anyone that knows me know I love the arts, I study art history and my room is filled with prints of famous art pieces. Especially the renaissance and baroque period are very near to my heart, and I always loved stories situated in Italy at the height of the art boom.

This book delivers. Emmelie Arents shows that she knows what she’s writing about, and it shows that she has done her research. As an art historian, seeing the names of famous painters pop up made me gasp and yell, the references to music made me swoon and as someone specializing in theatrical arts, any reference to Shakespeare just makes me so so excited.

I’ve been semi-following this author through her writing journey, and have read quite a bit about how with writing in English, she now wants to work on adding more prose in her novels. While I felt sometimes the story could use a bit more show and less tell, maybe some more prose, or the dialogues could be fleshed out a little better, I can definitely see the massive improvement in the writing, compared to Arents’ debut novel Het Hart van de Adelaar (which I absolutely loved as well and got me hooked on her writing).

I would recommend this story to anyone looking for an experience into Italy in the height of the art period, when you’re interested in the arts, or just generally looking for a mysterious ánd romantic story.