Vatican – The Grateful Reader

Publication May 14, 2024-St. Martin’s Press-Historical Fiction-336pp

Book Summary

The bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls returns with a brilliant novel of love and art, of grief and memory, of confronting the past and facing the future.

In 1955, Vivien Lowry is facing the greatest challenge of her life. Her latest play, the only female-authored play on the London stage that season, has opened in the West End to rapturous applause from the audience. The reviewers, however, are not as impressed as the playgoers and their savage notices not only shut down the play but ruin Lowry’s last chance for a dramatic career. With her future in London not looking bright, at the suggestion of her friend, Peggy Guggenheim, Vivien takes a job in as a script doctor on a major film shooting in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios. There she finds a vibrant movie making scene filled with rising stars, acclaimed directors, and famous actors in a country that is torn between its past and its potentially bright future, between the liberation of the post-war cinema and the restrictions of the Catholic Church that permeates the very soul of Italy.

As Vivien tries to forge a new future for herself, she also must face the long-buried truth of the recent World War and the mystery of what really happened to her deceased fiancé. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a brilliant exploration of trauma and tragedy, hope and renewal, filled with dazzling characters both real and imaginary, from the incomparable author who charmed the world with her novels The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls.

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City casts a golden glow over Rome and its many visitors. Vivien Lowry may sense her script writing is more in its shadow than its glow. Natalie Jenner sinks readers into the complexities of Italian political, economic, and cultural life in the 1940s and 1950s. Her dual timeline alternates between La Scolaretta, the resistance fighter in 1943 and Vivien, the London playwright in 1954-1956.

Jenner’s novel is a standalone, laced with characters her readers will recognize from The Bloomsbury Girls, though Jenner provides excellent background and details to support them in the plot. How we atone or make reparations is a theme rooted in Vivien’s realization that she has been operating out of fear and anger. Through Vivien’s new relationships Jenner also explores mother-child dynamics. The characters, motivated by many different circumstances, experience surprising twists which provide ample topics for discussion.

Every Time We Say Goodbye shines a light on the absolute power and prevailing influence of the Vatican on the movie industry in the mid-20^th century. Through Cardinal Marchetti and Vivien’s script writing experience the tangled threads of the Church, the police, the state, and movie studios are unraveled. Jenner also highlights the power of cinema to eventually create a new reality.

Discovering the true nature of friends and family, which may be heartbreaking or uplifting, is another theme. Jenner’s characters represent the invisible damages of war- using acts of goodness as a shield or as an emotional cocoon. My favorite, Sir Alfred Knox, the British industrialist, and philanthropist, is a wonderful homage to all those who risked their own lives to save others, helping hundreds of Jewish children escape.

Risk, relationships, renewal-wrapped in an Italian love story.

NATALIE JENNER is the author of the instant international bestseller The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls. A Goodreads Choice Award runner-up for historical fiction and finalist for best debut novel, The Jane Austen Society was a USA Today and #1 national bestseller and has been sold for translation in twenty countries. Born in England and raised in Canada, Natalie has been a corporate lawyer, career coach and, most recently, an independent bookstore owner in Oakville, Ontario, where she lives with her family and two rescue dogs. https://www.nataliejenner.com/

Another Fabulous Art History Thriller by the Bestselling Author of Oil and Marble, Featuring the Master of Renaissance Perfection: Raphael!

“Stephanie Storey’s debut novel Oil and Marble was hailed as “tremendously entertaining” by The New York Times, has been translated into six languages, and is currently in development as a feature film by Pioneer Pictures. Storey is also the author of Raphael, Painter in Rome, which came out in April 2020 in conjunction with the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death.

Storey has a degree in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and attended a PhD program in Art History, before leaving to get an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, and has studied art in Italy and been on a pilgrimage to see every Michelangelo on display in Europe.

Storey has also been a national television producer for nearly twenty years in Los Angeles for shows including Alec Baldwin on ABC, Arsenio Hall for CBS, and Emmy-nominated The Writers’ Room on the Sundance Channel. When not writing novels or producing television, Storey can usually be found with husband Mike Gandolfi — an actor and Emmy-winning comedy writer — traveling the world in search of their next stories. ” https://stephaniestorey.com/

Raphael : Summary from Simon & Schuster

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is one of the most iconic masterpieces of the Renaissance. Here, in Raphael, Painter in Rome, Storey tells of its creation as never before: through the eyes of Michelangelo’s fiercest rival—the young, beautiful, brilliant painter of perfection, Raphael. Orphaned at age eleven, Raphael is determined to keep the deathbed promise he made to his father: become the greatest artist in history. But to be the best, he must beat the best, the legendary sculptor of the David, Michelangelo Buonarroti. When Pope Julius II calls both artists down to Rome, they are pitted against each other: Michelangelo painting the Sistine Ceiling, while Raphael decorates the pope’s private apartments. As Raphael strives toward perfection in paint, he battles internal demons: his desperate ambition, crippling fear of imperfection, and unshakable loneliness. Along the way, he conspires with cardinals, scrambles through the ruins of ancient Rome, and falls in love with a baker’s-daughter-turned-prostitute who becomes his muse.

Grateful Reader Review by Dorothy Schwab

“Why this is shaping up to be a wonderful competition, isn’t it?” The pope said with a musical lilt. “A Florentine in the Sistine, and an Urbinite in my apartments. May the best painter win.”

Stephanie Storey paints a fresco for readers: blending a fiery piazza in Florence with the eyebrow-raising shenanigans of the Vatican halls in Rome; highlighting Raphael’s insecurities and obsessions while illuminating Michelangelo’s gifts in sculpture and his unpredictable inadequacies in oil! Told in first person, which makes this novel an absolute delight, readers will gush at being taken into Raphael’s confidence, as he recounts the competition for becoming the best painter on the peninsula or even the world!

The reader is immersed in rich descriptions of Italian villages, the people’s deep emotion and devotion to family and the volatile political landscape of the late 1400’s. Strategies to succeed and be noticed by the pope and struggles with technique and recipes for a fresco mix, are the “tarps” over Raphael’s obsessive tendencies like twirling his father’s paintbrush or parting his hair behind his ears, and- oh the counting: una, due, tre, quattro– so he enters a room on the right number and foot! Readers will learn a bit of Italian and fill tablets with Renaissance history and places to visit. All this along with dukes, cardinals, palaces, and parades, are mixed into a stunning palette of plot and paintings.

Author, Stephanie Storey, suggests keeping a device handy for researching paintings so the visual descriptions and historical references may be appreciated and discovered as the novel progresses. This is good advice! The account of Raphael’s pondering, in retrospect, about the visit of Martin Luther to Rome and his possible reaction to the “sin, excess, and corruption” regarding the behavior of the cardinals, the pope, and the aristocrats, was certainly eye-opening and pointed to a naivete of the general population. Was this trip, in fact, what prompted Martin Luther to return home to Germany to write his bishop, including his 95 Theses; thus leading to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation?

Raphael hoped his paintings would “bend the world away from the earthly realm of violence, anger and war, and toward the heavenly ideal of harmony, love, and peace.” When a painting is revealed to the world the artist has no control of how it is received-people see what they want to see. The same is true when an author releases a book into the hands of readers- themes and characters are perceived in individual ways. After years of study and research, Stephanie Storey’s Raphael: Painter in Rome is a portrait of adoration and respect for the painters of the Renaissance. Her hope is that Raphael and his readers will “bend the world toward beauty.”