We are just doing spring clean-up and replacing a lot of lost plants and shrubs from the extremely cold winter we had. I found this very poignant and wanted to explore the idea of how and why so many "good" people could do bad things during WWII. In the current time Juliet’s great niece Caroline is struggling with an unhappy marriage and an unsatisfying life.

BOOK REVIEW: THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK | Military Press BOOK REVIEW: THE VENICE SKETCHBOOK | Military Press

In 1938, Juliet Browning is an art teacher, she arrives in Venice with twelve students, for them to experience the cities, art, history, culture and food. Fate will place Teddy living in New York with his American father after the Twin Towers have been attacked. I liked Caroline a lot, I ended up seeing Julietta as both heroic and incredibly naïve at the same time, and I wanted the 21st century story more than I did the historic one. Two women, decades apart, escape to Venice, each forced to grapple with the influence of world events on her own life.When Caroline's great aunt dies, she leaves a sketchbook and three keys; these lead to Venice where Caroline unravels several secrets which have been hidden from the family for over sixty years.

The Venice Sketchbook – The 52 Book Club The Venice Sketchbook – The 52 Book Club

A woman who left behind everything she loved and everything she held dear to make a new life back in her old home. I've got no qualms about giving this one star because it's got a higher average rating than Hamlet, War and Peace and Pride and Prejudice. I can say with 100%, no with 1000% certainty that I am in love with this book, with every word that I have just read and with author's style!I really was very disappointed in this and I think if the author had settled on concentrating on one time period, she might have managed a more riveting story. She is stuck in Venice during the war and must hide her identity and pretend to be Italian from Venice, until her cover is blown. Their stories are linked, not just by the city, and not just by these two women’s relationship to each other, but also to a family that influences both of their lives. Caroline Grant (2001), young mother, who is trying to accept the end of her marriage and to move forward in her life.

The Venice Sketchbook: A Novel by Rhys Bowen, Paperback

Rhys Bowen presents The Venice Sketchbook which travels in a time-spanning arc from 1928, then to 1938 and then to 2001. I think that the issues I had with Lettie/Julietta’s part of the story was that so much of what she did has been written before, and the parts of the story that were unique to her were a bit too predictable, especially her doomed romance and its results. However, ten years later, she is gifted a bursary as an art teacher to travel to Venice and study art for a year. Venice, a dying bequest by Caroline Grant’s beloved great-aunt Lettie, a wish that will bring Caroline to scatter Lettie’s ashes in the city she loved. It is a story of Juliet's love of Venice, her love for Leo, and a bitter betrayal by someone she trusted.Caroline's close to her grandmother Winnie and her great-aunt Lettie, she visits them in Surrey and she’s in need of some moral support. What she discovers, or who she discovers, is the woman her staid, upright, prim, proper and utterly respectable great-aunt Lettie used to be.