Maybe I read a different book than everyone else? 3 stars is being generous but this felt like a book that would never end! We know what happens on the very first page and it takes us 350 pages to get to an anticlimactic ending where that thing happens (more or less). I did love the setting and the characters and would happily read other historical fiction books featuring the Medicis. But the formatting was maddening! Chapters that are 2 pages followed by chapters that are 70 pages for no especially good reason and the split timelines were too close together to easily tell apart. And I love description but it was excessive to say the least. I’m so glad that others are enjoying it but I am not sad I’m done reading it… thanks to NetGalley for the arc though!

Another absolute showstopper from O'Farrell. I have loved everything she's put out, and this new novel is right up there with Hamnet for me. Absolutely incredible.

Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet was critically lauded and loved by readers but I felt it was a bit flat and dragged. The writing was beautiful but the story wasn't compelling. The Marriage Portrait builds on what I thought worked in Hamnet but improved in regards to the plot. It was interesting, engaging, and beautifully written. A great fall read.

What an extraordinary novel!! The Marriage Portrait is set in the mid 1500's and follows Lucrezia de Medici and tells the story of her short life. She is the 5th child and 3rd daughter of the Grand Duke of Florence. Her elder sister, Maria is set to marry Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara but dies unexpectedly, Lucrezia, just 15, marries Alfonso instead. Lucrezia is married at 15 and dead by age 16. This young woman is a political pawn, possession, and suitable uterus to produce an heir.

Maggie O'Farrell writes such lush prose with attention to all of the details. Her words evoke sights, sounds and smells that carry you there and make you feel that you are present alongside of Lucrezia watching her grow up. I really enjoyed this novel and was engaged and drawn in from the beginning when the story opens with Lucrezia realizing her husband intends to kill her. Lucrezia is such a memorable character who will stay with me long after finishing the book.
Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an advance copy of this beautifully written book.

Italian Historical Fiction/jumps from timeframes/gets you thinking/wondering from the first few pages

As the novel opens, we find Lucrezia de Medici, 16-year-old wife of Alfonso, the Duke of Ferrara, fearing that her husband intends to kill her. The novel moves back and forth between 13-year-old Lucrezia who is told she must marry her dead sister’s fiancé and the young bride fearing for her life. O’Farrell based the novel of a young girl forced into marriage and her husband’s attempts to dominate the girl’s free spirit on the real marriage of the Duke and Lucrezia in the sixteenth century.

Robert Browning wrote a famous poem entitled “My Last Duchess” that examined the portrait of the young bride (book cover image) that her husband shows to visitors as he deplores his dead wife’s refusal to be totally under his control. It was not unusual for women at the time to be rigorously controlled by their husbands. Lucrezia loves the outdoors and she loves to paint. Her husband takes his 15-year-old bride away from all she loves – her family, the outdoors, interaction with others and even her beloved painting. But perhaps he goes even farther in his need to be in complete control.

O’Farrell creates an atmosphere of doom, of pending danger. Lucrezia becomes more erratic in her behavior as she has no one to turn to. Like Browning’s poem, the story is based upon the real Duke and Lucrezia. She did marry very young and did mysteriously die shortly thereafter. But the book is fiction and imagines the torment the girl suffered and the duplicity of a man who demands total servitude from his spouse. Powerful and frightening, a sad story of a girl crushed by the life she’s forced to endure.

Like Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring or Geraldine Brooks' Year of Wonders, this story of Lucrezia grabs the reader from the start. Based in a time when women were property, and had to stifle their true spirits, this tale set in the late 1500s is heartbreaking and hopeful.

First line: Lucrezia is taking her seat at the long dining table, which is polished to a watery gleam and spread with dishes, inverted cups, a woven circlet of fir.

Summary: Lucrezia de’ Medici is the third daughter of the grand duke of Florence. She has always been considered a little different than her siblings. Her family has given her freedom but also the same learning as her brothers. After the death of her sister she is suddenly pushed into a betrothal with her sister’s fiancé, the duke of Ferrara. Even though she fears this marriage she is a dutiful daughter. At first things seem to be going well with her husband but as time passes without an heir she starts to worry that something sinister is brewing in the duke’s mind.

My Thoughts: This book was beautifully written. I love O’Farrell’s style. It is almost poetic in the way it flows. For some it may not be their style and seem rather slow but I found it perfect for the period and subject.

Very little is known about the events of Lucrezia’s life but O’Farrell does a wonderful job of filling out the story and the characters. The narrative flashes back and forth between her childhood and the time of her marriage. I found the scenes with her husband to be dark and sinister. She is worried he is trying to kill her but she continues to question her feelings. As a reader I could feel the tension as she tried to decide how to handle her precarious situation.

If you loved Hamnet then I believe you will find this one just as intriguing. It has the same feeling of dread approaching with the same lyrical writing. I would highly recommend it be savored with a glass of wine on a crisp fall day.

Maggie O’Farrell does it again - another beautiful story. A great work of historical fiction of how a young woman tries to survive the fate that she has been dealt. The lack of choices that women had and no matter how privileged the difference was only if the case was gilded or not.

In The Marriage Portrait, O’Farrell has returned to the realm of historical fiction, this time focusing on rounding out the life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, whose untimely demise history has long debated and whose story served as the inspiration for Robert Browning’s haunting poem, My Last Duchess. Lucrezia’s story unfolds in a nonlinear timeline (which has become somewhat of a signature for O’Farrell), allowing her to create tension from the opening scene. She then takes us back to show us Lucrezia’s rather unusual childhood, painting her as a feral outsider amongst her aristocratic family. I was enthralled by the way O’Farrell’s third-person narrator kept Lucrezia enigmatic, while making her emotions and desires totally visceral, and while I’m not sure I ever fully knew Lucrezia, I can say that her yearnings, her heartaches, and, most notably, her fears and suspicions were thoroughly palpable.This novel is slow to start and at times a bit tangled, and admittedly to me didn't have the emotional resonance of some of O'Farrell's previous works. That said, she is a world class author and in this book shows her at the pinnacle of her craft..The Marriage Plot is meticulously structured in a way that creates a building sense of doom and disorientation, making us wonder if we can truly trust what we are seeing or if we and Lucrezia both are experiencing an intense paranoia. Of the books I’ve read of hers, this is by far the eeriest and most autumnal O’Farrell novel, and like the rest of her work, The Marriage Portrait rewards a steady and deliberate reading. If you can hold out, stash this book away until the nights get a little crisper and you have a stretch of uninterrupted reading time to truly lose yourself in it.

Reading mood: you want to curl under a blanket with a perfectly constructed slow burning novel

Read this if you like: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, slow burn books, books you want to reread as soon as you finish

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell is an intriguing look at the hard lives women faced during the reign of the Medici family during the Italian Renaissance and mid-sixteenth century Florence. Lucrezia de' Medici suddenly finds herself in an unwanted, unexpected marriage to the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso. Based loosely on historical fact that intertwines fictionalized events, the story of Lucrezia's short marriage to the duke tragically ends only a year after it takes place.

Women have had little say in their own destinies throughout history, and it seems, most especially if they were a part of ruling dynasties. Lucrezia was the wild child of her family, and never expected to find herself as a replacement for her dead sister and as a married woman, yet there was little other choice for her. The story is told beautifully, weaving in and out of events leading up to the marriage and throughout the year after, before her untimely, unexpected death. Maggie O'Farrell writes beautifully of what Lucrezia endured; of her passion and frustration, comparing her life to that of a trapped tiger her father obtained when she was young.

Thought provoking and descriptive, this is a truly enjoyable book. I am grateful for the opportunity granted from Knopf and NetGalley to read this book. It did not disappoint.

The work of a master at her peak. O'Farrell brings Renaissance Florence to life in vivid detail. She grasps and clearly communicates the complicated place that women held in the Florentine courts- it was a life of luxurious privilege and stifling restrictions, in which women had to act within and sometimes around the constraints placed on them. Lucrezia is a fascinating figure and I really enjoyed spending time in her world and her worldview.

A young girl is married to an older man to help her family. She is convinced that her life is in danger.

As good as Hamnet. Really intriguing look at a historical story that gives us a literary "answer" to a mystery we will never know the answer to. The author masterfully wraps us up in this story until we are convinced by the tale.

So glad to get historical fiction that has depth of emotion and isn't stuck in the same place/time period that so many seem to be.

I enjoyed this book much more than Hamnet. Her characters were full-bodied and relatable. I felt sympathy for the young bride who just wanted to be loved.

Absolutely incredible book that reimagines the life of Lucrezia Medici. The prose is alluring, magical, and will stay with you long after the novel has finished. I found that this novel tackles issues like women's roles in society in a much more thoughtful, less heavy-handed way than many other historical novels being churned out right now (like the Greek myth retellings from women's POV coming out. Many of them are bland).

Hats off to O'Farrell for this masterpiece!

The Marriage Portrait is set in Renaissance Italy (1550s) and is based on the life of Lucrezia de Medici, a noble-born girl who was married off to another noble nearly twice her age (yuck) when she was a young teenager. She was dead a year later. The story opens with Lucrezia panicking, certain she’s about to be murdered by her husband, and moves back and forth in time from her childhood in Florence to her present day situation, isolated in a hunting lodge completely at the mercy of her husband.

I absolutely loved this book! I haven’t read Hamnet but am tempted to now because O’Farrell’s writing is so gorgeous. I’m not a big historical fiction reader, but there was so much tension in this story that it almost read like a thriller. You know Lucrezia will eventually find herself in that hunting lodge, so seeing her initial fragile trust and affection for her husband and her small moments of happiness turn into fear for her life as he reveals his dark side — aaaaaaagh. So good.

I will say… I thought the ending was a little frustrating. On one hand, I loved it, but on the other hand… and it’s impossible to discuss without spoilers.

Highly recommend!

For a relatively short book, I found that this dragged a lot. Maybe it was what I thought to be the foregone conclusion making everything seem kind of pointless, or maybe it was all the excruciatingly precise detail that made it seem like this book was moving so slow. For readers who love sensory descriptions and need little else to enjoy a book, this will be a feast. For me, though, it felt like padding. As good as the writing is this story just didn't feel like it warranted so many fine brushstrokes, if you will.

Better used was the pacing and the way O'Farrell cuts up the story, moving us forward and backward in time: that kept drawing my attention back after it wandered away after the umpteenth description of the sky or the distant palazzo. You do very much feel the tension as things move closer and closer towards the end and the final hundred or so pages make up for a lot of the slowness that preceded them. That said...I'm not sure how to feel about the ending. It's kind of...a thoughtless sort of wish-fulfillment.

Overall, I don't know that this really sold me - either on its own merits or on historical fiction written about real people in general. I can see a lot of other readers enjoying it, but I'm not sure I'll return to O'Farrell or this type of book.

Those are tiger stripes on the cover.

Your heroine has tiger stripes.

And this novel is how our young, naive, teenage Duchess earns her stripes.

Beautiful and engaging, full of political intrigue, but the characters aren't quite as deeply drawn as in Hamnet. Still a recommended read for history fans and fans of authors like Hillary Mantel.

Oh how I wish there was more to Lucrezia’s story. With beautiful writing and scenery I fell in love with this book and the main character Lucrezia. The more I read the more I related to her and dreaded the ending of the book. So beautiful, I recommend for anyone who loves to read about women lost to history.

I absolutely loved Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, and had high expectations for this new historical novel. But although the story of Lucrezia was engaging and O'Farrell's prose beautiful - the book was just too long and slow moving. It was very difficult to keep focus on the book, and took way too long to finish.

Thank you NetGalley for the chance to read and review this ARC