Raphael, Painter in Rome

This book is fine. Some of the details of historic painting techniques are interesting, there is a colourful cast of real-life characters, and the ebook version I read had links to all of the artworks described, which was really cool.

However, this is not a thriller. If you are coming in off the blurb on here you will be disappointed. It's a standard list of events historical fiction narrated by the protagonist, and while there is occasionally a vague threat of violence it is at a remove from the story. Secondly, I understand the choice to use that flippant YA style of writing to indicate Raphael's youth but it did not work for me. I understand the sequence of events involved but the character arc for Raphael was boring and I was left feeling kind of unfulfilled.