As quickly as I was swept away by Lizzie’s love affair with Dante and her friendship with Grey, it was her mothering of Etta—against the realities of time, location and sickness—that took my breath away. As Dante says in one of the novel’s most powerful scenes, 'Grief is a gift. Grief means that you threw your heart into life and lived it fiercely. Suffering is a gift.' Reading this book is by no means an act of suffering, but there is plenty of grief and, as Dante explains it, plenty of heart, life and fierceness to match it. A powerful story about choosing to live and the courage it takes to do so, dying or not, and the extravagance of a life well-lived ... without a doubt the best book of summer 2021. I cannot wait to see what else Mary Bly has up her sleeve.
... a thrilling scene [is] buried deep in a romantic novel about love, death and Italy, but not at all surprising given the book's author ... The scene fits quite naturally in the book, but it is also a lovely homage to Mary's father and his poet friends Wright and Donald Hall (upon whom the character of Joseph is based) ... something different, a moving modern-day love story laced with poetry ... it's also good to see [Bly] shuck the rustling taffeta of the Georgian era for a bikini and sandals, and to see her sizzling sex scenes laced with a bit of poetry.
... a poignant, character-driven novel about living, loving, and looking mortality in the eye ... Bly doesn't spare the tears, breathing life into each of her genuine, passionate characters, especially Lizzie, the emotional tinderbox. She also brilliantly handles some tricky relationships and takes readers on an armchair adventure to Elba ... Fans of emotional tearjerkers, of romance, or of authors Kristin Hannah and Elin Hilderbrand will not be able to put this down.
Bly, known best for the best-selling historical romances she writes as Eloisa James, deftly pivots to contemporary fiction with an emotional roller coaster of a novel that candidly explores such complicated subjects as sex and desire, love and loss, and family and friendship ... Bly writes with a Prosecco-fizzy wit that is simply irresistible, but what will equally resonate with readers is her richly nuanced characters and their embrace of life in all its glorious messiness.
Bly renders her characters in pliant and incisive prose; the sex scenes are sexy and the portrait of a woman embarking on the romance of her life while running on borrowed time feels authentic and poignantly drawn, and never mawkish. The nascent relationship between Lizzie and Etta, meanwhile, is especially moving. Bly handles a delicate subject with aplomb.
Bly makes an interesting narrative choice, telling the story from the points of view of Lizzie and Etta, Dante’s daughter. Etta is knowledgeable enough about literature to banter with Lizzie about Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and gender roles in Shakespeare's plays, but she's still a child, and her perspective confines the reader’s experience of the book. An emotional journey that's stunted by the way it's told.
