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Siracusa by Delia Ephron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book, and it was a struggle to see where to place this in my ratings. This book was good and unique, but nothing completely amazing. The pacing was extremely slow, because the climax was predictable and happens at the very end of the novel. I personally like plot-driven books with a lot of action, but of course this was heavily character-centered which I should have been more aware of before selecting to spend my time on this. The buildup was absolutely great, I could feel the tension and the suspense that the author had tried to intertwine with all of the masterful subtle foreshadowing that she was showing. If I were in that hotel room, I think that I could visibly seen the tension swirling around in clouds in the rooms when the "things" happened.

So, what Ephron creates is 4 individual voices that narrated a vacation to Italy and obviously Siracusa, and my only thing that these perspectives lacked what that I had wished we could have a 1st POV from Snow, because she is extremely shy we never know what is really going on inside her head. There is Lizzie, Michael, Taylor, and Finn, who are very interconnected threads in their lives. It is essentially interesting to be an outsider in these twisted situations that are going on sometimes "secretly". This story is a lot of rocky and broken marriages that just make me want to cringe with some of the things that were going on between specific characters.

"In life one rarely knows which remarks of the hundreds uttered in the course of a day will turn out to be auspicious."

If I'm honest, I almost gave up on continuing with this book, because I found the character extremely irritable unlikely. Although I could see specific instances justified but mostly I felt their behavior completely disturbing and their motives misplaced. There was some quotes that could really resonate with some of those things that they displayed about life.

Let's talk about the ending, without any spoiler because this is what ultimately disappointed me the most. I think that it was too "swept up" and I didn't like how some particular issues seems to be pushed to the and forgotten, while the readers weren't able to move on because the epilogue was 4 pages, not the timespan of four months later. Ultimately, because the ending broke the deal for me, I wasn't able to appreciate the book fully, or much less than I was expected.

**Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me an e-ARC for me in exchange for my honest review.**

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