The Lost Diary of Venice

 I hate it when the illustrator obviously hasn't bothered to do even a decent skim of the text he/she is supposed to be creating a cover for.  Such is the case with Margaux DeRoux's debut novel The Lost Diary of Venice (#971).  I expected to find a romance with the plot switching between a modern day book conservator/restorer working on a late sixteenth century work of a Venetian artist and that artist's romance hidden in the palimpsest he created.  Instead, the romance in both centuries were blighted, the coincidences a little too much to swallow and the violent history, though accurate, was of an unexpectedly graphic nature.  If you're in search of happy endings, you won't find them in this book.  The old saw is true: you really can't judge a book by its cover.

On the other hand, the treatise translated in fiction actually does exist, although the artist was from Milan, not Venice. The battle of Lepanto, considering its impact on the history of Western Europe rarely seems to figure in fictional accounts, so it's interesting that the author decides to use the tensions arising from the threats to Christian Europe, and especially to Venice, the powerful maritime power, for her story - class, wealth, religion, ambition, power and beauty all play a role here.  So does magic to some extent, which to me, at least, seemed somewhat out of place here.

I did read it through to the end, but would I read another of DeRoux's books?  I'm thinking my shelves would have to be pretty empty before I spent more time on her work.