THE MARRIAGE PORTRAIT

Are you like me - did you inexplicably backlist this fantastic novel when it debuted last year? Time to fix that ASAP because The Marriage Portrait is amazing, and I am SO happy I picked it up, finally. Set in 1550s Florence, this novel tells the story of young teenage duchess Lucrezia de’Medici, who is forced to marry her older sister’s fiancé, the duke of Ferrara. Free spirited Lucrezia must navigate the dictatorial confinement of her increasingly malevolent husband, who is desperate to produce an heir. Before long her distrust turns into quiet, growing panic as Lucrezia begins to suspect that she is in fact imprisoned, and in mortal danger.
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Do you believe in book-kismet? When all the stars align and a book crosses your path at exactly the right time? The Marriage Portrait made me believe again! This one was a holiday gift last year but the timing wasn’t right, and I shelved it for months. On a whim, I pulled it off a shelf and promptly fell in love. With an unusual reverse dual timeline structure, writing that is an unexpected balance of literary and suspenseful, and a firecracker ending, this one was a total winner for me. The icing on the cake: one of my boys is coincidentally reading this for his high school literature class (!!!) so I kind of freaked out with excitement upon this discovery! (The freak out was not mutual lol.)
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I’ve become a bit obsessed with food from this region while planning an upcoming trip - so this book’s cooking choice was easy. There’s a scene with soup where a distracted Lucrezia “let her spoon sweep from one side of the bowl to the other, like an oar pushing a galley ship through the sea.” I imagined this to be robollita, a traditional Tuscan bread soup with kale and white beans that seems to be everywhere in Florence. I modified and combined a few recipes and added Italian bread and parmesan for total winter stew deliciousness!