Maintaining a sense of dread and suspense without your reader losing interest isn’t easy and Moreno-Garcia achieved it three times over! I was so captivated and invested in the two (and eventually three) storylines and, though I figured out what was going on fairly early on, it in no way diminished my enjoyment. In fact, it felt very on brand for the genre; as the reader you want to scream at the characters to beware! don’t trust that person! but instead you’re trapped on your side of the pages. The lore and world-building were spot-on and the writing was so vivid, I hope that this becomes a movie/show!

So, so good, my new favorite from Moreno-Garcia!

So, going into this, I pretty much knew nothing about it and was curious about Charles, the narrator who bit by bit unravels the story of his life.

He is a perpetual outsider as a white man living on the edge of the Penobscot Nation (where he was raised by his Penobscot stepfather and mother) and he's now unable to connect to the last of his living family as his mother's health and memory are failing and she doesn't recognize him and his daughter doesn't know who he is to her. Despite all of that, Charles is devoted to the both of them and does his best (often imperfectly) to protect and help them, even if neither of them know him. The writing flows well and was so emotionally moving. The (at times) nonlinear storytelling really lent the narrative an organic, natural storytelling feel which also lent itself well to audio (I listened and read this).

Palmer successfully complicates the narrative surrounding the Renaissance through portraits of various people from religion to art to politics. Palmer first shows what we think of being "Renaissance" (and, also, the idea of separate renaissances) and then, through the variety of Renaissance figures, complicates that tidy image that the Enlightenment created. I appreciated how thoroughly Palmer sketched out Machiavelli's world before getting around to him (though I found those later sections to be the strongest) and reminding the reader of how long the grand sweeping passage of time is that we call the Renaissance.