Book Review: Towers of Tuscany by Carol M Cram

This book was recommended to me by a friend.  I found it slow to get into at the start but it intrigued me, the writing was good and the characters were interesting, especially the main character Sofia.  

Sofia Carducci is a daughter of a painter but it unable to proceed with her passion of painting because she is a women and painting is for men and not women.  This greatly annoys Sofia but she is a strong women and claims the right to make her own decisions and her own mistakes as well.  Her first mistake is convincing her father to let her marry Giorgio Carell, a wealthy saffron merchant in San Gimignano, the Tuscan city of towers.

Sofia believes that when she is married she can still continue to paint but this is not the case, and the ends up in a loveless marriage with a man who comes to despise her when she does not produce a son.  However, she still has her father, until that he is taken away from her in an attack motivated by vendetta.

This attack motivates Sofia to act and she decides to try and free herself by running away from the misery she is in. She ends up in Siena and under the disguise of a boy she begins to pain again in Maestro Manzini’s workshop.  On doing this Sofia enters a life of disguise and that of mis-trust as well – she mistrusts those around her worried that her secret will come out – which would in turn destroy her and those around her as well.

Towers of Tuscany is a story of love, passion, desire, disguise, mis-trust, death, survival, friendship, family as well as painting.  It is a story you get invested in because the author makes you care deeply for Sofia, which is in truth great writing.  I was for Sofia from the beginning, routing for her, hoping she would succeed in her actions and that life would turn out happy for her.    To me this book is a must read and I look forward to reading more by Carol Cram.