The Music Lesson

A quick read but now that I've come to the end, I've been left thinking about the plausibility of all of this happening. I enjoyed the pace of the novel and the gradual unfolding of the tale. This was more about Patricia Dolan and how she came to be where she was. Worth a read :) ( )

A quick, fun novella... art theft, the IRA, an American woman hiding out with a Vermeer in the Irish countryside. Entertaining if not all that memorable. ( )

The 3 stars are probably for the Vermeer paintings, which I looked up and enjoyed. The plot and its execution were boring and unbelievable. ( )

This novel tells the story of Patricia Dolan, a middle-aged art historian who finds herself in the midst of a mid-life crisis of epic proportions. The book opens with Dolan in the midst of a large-scale art heist, which removed a Vermeer from the clutches of none less than Buckingham Palace. Dolan is holed up in a cottage in a tiny, remote Irish Village with the stolen painting. How an American art history professor came to find herself in this situation comprises the first three-quarters of th book. The rest brings the heist to its dramatic and suspense-filled conclusion. At the outset of the book Patricia Dolan finds herself stalled in her career, divorced, and greiving the death of her daughter. She finds solace in a long-lost, decades youngr cousin who tumbles into her life and becomes the other half of Dolan's torrid love affair. It's the fling with this Irish cousin who launches Dolan into an Irish Liberation plot to steal a British-owned Vermeer. I found this book undeniably slow to get going. The details of Patricia's relationship with her cousin Mickey were not especially interesting. What was interesting was how an unassuming professor came to find herself in the midst of an international art heist. For as exciting as this book should have been, it simply was not. The characters were not especially well-developed, and were not always believable. The most interesting entity in this book is the painting, The Music Lesson. Perhaps this is intentional. The best-expressed emotion in this book is Patricia's love for the painting. The final, dramatic ending is the highlight of the book. Getting there, however, is slow going. ( )

I really wanted to be enchanted by this one, but it was just okay. Vermeer's works are so magical to me. That's not to say there weren't moments of passion and beauty, but what shocked me is that the painting never came alive for me. The story starts out in Ireland, where Art Historian Patricia Dolan is babysitting a stolen painting. Told in flashbacks, the story unfolds to reveal the layers of Dolan's life: her own losses and regaining of passion, interwoven with her discovery of her Irish heritage. That it involves a cousin who is involved with an IRA splinter group, and an art heist breaks it out of the norm. Still, I wish I could have really felt the magic of Vermeer. That would have made it a full 5 stars for me. ( )