MoMoBookDiary

📖 Book Description

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🌟 Book Tour

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✍️ About the Author

M.A. McLaughlin

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👩🏻‍💻 My Review

Where Family Secrets, Art and History Come Together

There was so much about The Secret Diary of Rome that appealed to me – an antique music box, an old diary, rare books, family secrets and a book restorer trying to piece together a history she never knew existed. Add Rome into the mix and I was very quickly drawn into Emilia’s story.

Emilia has grown up knowing almost nothing about her mother’s family or the past her mother refused to discuss. When she unexpectedly finds herself travelling from New York to Rome following the death of a grandmother she never knew, she suddenly has the opportunity to discover some of those answers for herself. I loved the sense of mystery surrounding her family and the gradual uncovering of things that had remained hidden for so long.

Emilia being a book restorer was an immediate draw for me, and I particularly loved the way this is reflected in the structure of the novel. The story is divided into Stabilisation, Cleaning, Repair and Restoration – the stages involved in preserving and restoring a damaged book. As Emilia begins piecing together her own family history, those headings take on a lovely additional meaning. There is something rather special about a character who spends her life preserving damaged and forgotten stories finding herself trying to restore a story belonging to her own family.

The dual narrative worked beautifully too. Emilia’s story takes place in 1960, while Lizzie Siddal’s voice comes through the pages of her diary. This meant the historical story wasn’t simply running alongside Emilia’s; she was discovering it too. I really enjoyed watching those connections gradually emerge as the past began providing answers to questions in Emilia’s present.

There is a wonderful mixture of historical mystery and family drama throughout, with books, old documents and artwork all playing their part. I loved watching Emilia gradually uncover a family history that had previously been completely closed to her, with each discovery bringing another piece of her past into focus.

What I hadn’t expected was just how curious the historical side of the story would make me. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his artwork are woven throughout the novel, and although I knew nothing about him before reading this, eventually the references got the better of me and I went looking. Discovering some of the genuine history sitting underneath the fiction gave me an even greater appreciation for the detail M.A. McLaughlin has woven into the story.

And I have to admit that The Secret Diary of Rome took me longer to read than it probably should have, but for the best possible reason — it kept sending me off on side-quests! A painting would be mentioned and I’d want to see it; something historical would make me wonder whether it really happened. Every chapter even begins with a Rossetti quotation, and eventually I had to stop myself investigating those too and promise that I could go back to them once I’d actually finished the book!

Everything came together so satisfyingly in the end, particularly as Emilia finally found the answers she had been searching for about her mother, grandmother and the family history she had never been allowed to know. I loved seeing the different pieces gradually connect and understanding why they had all mattered.

The Secret Diary of Rome was so much better than I had expected – beautifully written, fascinating and full of history, mystery, books and long-buried family secrets. I went into it simply looking forward to a historical story set in Rome and came out of it with an unexpected list of things I now want to investigate.

Apparently, my side-quests aren’t quite finished yet. ❤️

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DISCLOSURE: I received a review copy of this book via Zooloo’s Book Tours and NetGalley.

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