A review by cclift1114
The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

funny informative mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

2.5

If you love Venice and its more recent history, this book may be for you. There were aspects of this I really enjoyed: some of the characters and their snarky quotes, the descriptions of the city and its people, the amount of research that Berendt must have done. I thought the mystery around the Fenice fire was intriguing, but feel that Berendt should have focused more on this. There seemed to be quite a bit of side stories that didn’t really fit with that arc and I didn’t find them all very compelling. Because of this, the book felt mostly self-indulgent, as if Berendt had done research on all these different topics and met all these people and wanted to put it all in this book. I feel that it would have been better to either stick to the Fenice completely or just do a series of vignettes of the people and places around Venice, instead of trying to shoehorn the two together.