I read this book on my kindle and found it difficult to keep a track of the passage of time. The chapters were very long and this added to this difficulty. I found myself skipping through pages of dialogue just to finish a chapter in one sitting. The length of the Italian personal names and places had me lost sometimes. As an historical piece it captured the infighting of the priests and aristocracy very well. For me it was too long a read.

An interesting cast of characters' and some history about the early days of Italy.. The story somewhat drags due to this and the authors long dissertations' on theology and politics of the era. The many seemingly disconnected strands of the story therefore takes quite a while before they come together..

Good Historical Background on Renaissance Italy, But too Long

The Visconti ruled Milan for generations. Now the last Visconti duke is dying without a legitimate heir. The Sforza, another noble family related to the Visconti, are waiting to be invited to rule the city. The city fathers don't like it, but the other choice is annihilation when Sforza attacks the city.

The old duke, however, is not childless. He has a son, Niccolo, by a noble woman. The child is only a baby and the duke fears that his enemies will have the child killed, so he entrusts the boy to Archdeacon Onorio. Unbeknownst to the duke, Onorio is a secret Druid. The Druids made their home in Milan many years before. They worship their goddess, Bellsama, who later evolves into the Virgin Mary, in a temple constructed near the foundation of the cathedral that is being constructed.

Niccolo grows up wanting to be a sculpture, and succeeds in becoming an artist. His closest friend is Lorenzo, a young commoner, who is a paid killer for the Sforza. Lorenzo's sister Maria becomes the mistress of an aristocrat, but is then abandoned. Niccolo falls in love with Angelica, but it is another doomed relationship because she, too, is a commoner, and he is a noble. The lives of these characters growing up form the basis of the story.

I enjoyed the amount of historical detail in the book. I hadn't realized that the Druids had so much influence in Italy. The descriptions of their rites and their study of alchemy and magic are fascinating, but this much detail detracts from the plot. The story moves back and forth in time, which also tends to be confusing.

I recommend this book if you enjoy historical novels and have an interest in renaissance Italy. If you like lots of detail you'll enjoy this book, but if you're looking for a briskly moving plot, you'll be disappointed.

I reviewed this book for Net Galley.

The main reason I feel comfortable giving this book a three star rating is because it could have a special appeal for readers interested in Italian history, specifically the history of the city-state of Milan in the 1400's and also readers particularly interested in early Catholic church history. Otherwise this would definitely earn two stars from me.

The novel centers on a changing group of Druid priests who work through the centuries to bring The Temple of Light into existence in order to worship the goddess Belisama (Celtic times), then Minerva (Roman era), and finally to the Virgin Mary (Christian era). All this time the Druids have studied and worked in secret to build the perfect altar on which to place their religious relics so the goddess would be pleased and bring about the apocalypse. The current group of Druids are also Catholic priests and are using the many times destroyed and rebuilt cathedral in Milan to accomplish this feat. Their mathematical computations and alchemy experiments will provide the answers for exactly how tall they need to build the spire and where to place the stone of light.

I'm sorry to say I did not find this a very interesting or enjoyable book to read. The author's style of writing was very dry, stiff and formal and it kept me from feeling any personal attachment or connection with the characters. I'm sure she had done a great deal of research into this subject matter because she included so very much of it in the novel. Nothing slows down a plot more than having too much factual material included in the body of the work. Even though Nicolo was a character who appeared through almost the entire book, I really never cared what happened to him. Incidents of rape and torture were so mechanically included they only caused me to want to get through reading them. Unfortunately, this is not a book I would personally recommend.