This was such a pleasant surprise. I can't believe this is such an underground book; it's written beautifully, has well-earned tension and suspense, and unflinchingly explores both mortality and immortality.

I love novels about vampires and gods particularly for their commentary on immortality. This was such a fresh look since the immortal protagonist is human and doesn't know how she became immortal.

Since she did not ask to become immortal, and this is not a world where other immortal creatures roam, we experience a whole new side to the condition: grief, loneliness, danger, a desperate need to escape.

I absolutely ate this up and need more people to give this a shot!

The unique storytelling here made this worthwhile, but was also ultimately the thing that kept this from being a full 5 star read. We get the story of this passionate and well drawn couple from all the people around them - best friends, strangers, coworkers. Each chapter is a new perspective and a new vignette, never repeating a character twice.

It's a cool storytelling device, and the writing was good enough to make it work, but the fatal flaw here is that short spurts of backstory are necessary in each short chapter to establish the new perspective, and since you know you're not spending time with whoever this character is (and often they have nothing to do with the couple, it's just a stranger on the street), these paragraphs become quickly tedious.

Regardless, I still enjoyed this a lot and loved the messy yes still heartwarming love story.

If travel blogs were a thing back in the 90's, Francis Mayes would have had a heyday. Instead she wrote this.

no rating for this one since it would be completely unfair to give this low stars when it was my fault for not doing research before diving in.

I always thought Under the Tuscan Sun was about a woman restarting her life in Italy and all the musings and lessons that came along with such a bold choice. After recently watching the movie, that presumption was solidified and it felt like the right time in my life to pick it up.

WRONG

There are very few musings to be found; this is mostly a play by play of renovating a house (very HGTV), cooking (literally dozens of pages of recipes), and describing Italian locales. I didn't get the sense of adventure or reinvention I was looking for, and wasn't interested enough in what it was actually offering to have a good time.

Very much reads like mundane journaling for your followers a la travel blog