Blood and Beauty (Sangue e onore: i Borgia), Sarah Dunant

This is a fun, easy read. I read all 522 pages in a 24 hour period [...] The POV changes a lot, sometimes mid-paragraph, which is not something I appreciate, especially the few times it swapped from 3rd to 1st person. Dunant has clearly done a lot of research, hitting all the ‘known’ points of Borgia history and interpreting it through her own lens; but ultimately this is a work of fiction, and of opinion, and often times it shows. [...]
Ultimately, Dunant is trying to make the Borgias likable, which is something about which I have mixed feelings. I think it’s an attempt to create sympathy around the legend of the Borgias, but I think this can be done without undermining their monstrousness. Here, the Borgias are presented as pawns of fate and their enemies (who also are not overly monstrous), almost as if there is no real villain.

The book ends with a chapter called ‘Leaving the Family,’ where Cesare convinces the Pope to allow Lucrezia to marry into the d’Este family - this he does in order to allow her to leave Rome, in an attempt to give his sister a life away from the family. This is constructed as something Lucrezia desperately wants, so eager is she to leave the family behind. Ending the book with her journey to Ferrara felt both natural and unnatural, mostly because the book starts in the same place that all Borgia books start - with the death of Innocent VIII and the election of Rodrigo - but ends well short of where we know the Borgia story usually ends. This doesn’t detract from the book, because as a story of Lucrezia it’s actually presented as a lovely ending, especially when coupled with the promise of a follow-up novel, which logically will follow on with Lucrezia - but it does jar a little, particularly as Lucrezia so pointedly doesn’t forgive Cesare for the death of her second husband. [...]

Dunant does a great job of conveying the closeness of Cesare and Lucrezia’s relationship, definitely bringing in those ‘really? that’s, uh, close’ moments and weaving them into the relationship. She brings Cesare’s jealousy and possessiveness to the fore, particularly from Lucrezia’s point of view (she realises that Cesare is jealous of Pedro, she worries that Cesare will kill Alfonso when he is no longer useful), and then when they make out (page 253, just the once), she runs away to a convent and basically that is the beginning of the deterioration of the Cesare and Lucrezia relationship. This act fits with the pious Lucrezia Dunant has constructed, but Dunant says she has written the ‘psychological truth’ of the Borgias as she understands it.