Susan Daitch

This book started off really fast paced and very interesting. Somewhere in the middle I got lost in the main characters thoughts, and it lagged. She is amazingly capable of surviving any situation! I loved all the art history information. Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy in exchange for my honest review.

Don’t call Stella Da Silva an art restorer. She’s a conservator. Instead of adding to a painting, she painstakingly cleans & mends to preserve whats already there. She was lucky to get her job at the Claiborne Auction House & spends her nights working in solitude.
Despite her inexperience, she’s given the chance to work on a famous painting by Velazquez that has been secretly shipped to New York for restoration. To say things don’t go as planned is an understatement. Her first night show more on the job ends with a dead body, a stolen painting & Stella on the run for her life.

It’s a great premise for an exciting tale & begins well enough. Unfortunately, the story becomes lost in a sea of characters, numerous convoluted subplots, an abundance of technical details about paint & the MC’s tendency for long streams of internal monologue in the middle of a scene.

Stella is a normal woman with a largely unremarkable background & that’s not a bad thing. But there were several things that kept me from connecting with & more importantly, believing in her character. Suffice to say her safe, quiet life is completely trashed by the fallout from the missing painting. She is in mortal danger because she can identify one of the men responsible for the carnage & he knows it. Yet, she has an oddly flat affect when it comes to situations that qualify as full on WTF moments & repeatedly makes decisions the average person would consider suicidal. Add to that a superhero-like ability to survive numerous attacks (plus she knows how to hit someone to cause “just enough head damage to make him lose consciousness”) & I’m afraid the last kernel of credibility quickly exits the stage.

There is a large cast of characters who are all self absorbed by their personal plights & not particularly likeable. The exception is Calvin, the night janitor at the auction house who befriends Stella. A couple of potential love interests pop up but there is little chemistry as both are snugly wrapped up in their own dramas.

A great deal of time & space is devoted to the history & science of paint. Although this tends to freeze action & slow the pace, I have to give the author credit. It’s obvious she did a tremendous amount of research on the subject & knows her stuff.

I really wanted to like this book as it combined 2 things I love, a puzzling murder mystery & art. In the end, it was just too over the top. A pared down story line, fewer subplots, more character development & a believable heroine would have helped me enjoy this more than I did. But hey…that’s just my $0.02.

Recommended for: fans of “Die Hard” show less

Golly was this ever a painful dreary endless read. So why did I bother? Honestly? I don't know. I guess because of what it purported to be about - which is woman's changing (or not changing) 'role' in 'revolutionary' activities L.C. gets involved in the revolutionary of February 1848 in France and her life spirals out of control, ever downward, through a combination of her choices and the limitations on what a woman at that time could do. The premise is that she wrote a journal that ends up show more the hands of one Willa Rehnfield in the 1930's who 'translates' it in the few days she has it in her hands, in what turns out to be an extremely questionable manner - that is - according to her own view of women in history. Fast forward to the recent past (60's - 80') and now Jane Amme, refugee in hiding from incidents at Berkeley in the late 60's now residing in NYC and working on Rehnfield's papers..... This should be fascinating, right? But it ain't. Daitch can write but she is not a fiction writer, she is an historian, primarily and each sentence unrolls stately and convoluted and utterly maddeningly the same until you want to scream! I could go on and on - there are illuminated moments that get completely lost in the monotony - a comparison of how children's war/cops and robber games/ political unrest/ soldiers and war are on a strange continuum and real/unreal all of them, or each one more real until it becomes unreal..... There is some change from 1848 to 1968, for women, but many of the same frustrations apply. The sexual component of violence for men being one and a dismissal of women's issues as being central to well, anything, to do with what 'really matters'. Jane and her friends have freedom of movement that Lucienne lacked, especially at the end, but then, why the heck didn't they go to America, the dopes? Why Algeria? Ah well, do I regret reading it, not really. The most 'authentic' part of it takes place in Berkeley and it feels to me like Susan Daitch lived some of it, if not at Berkeley then on some campus somewhere. I hate giving a book on which the person clearly worked, researched and wrote with such effort, but alas. ** show less

I really loved how this story was told and how it pulled all the different time periods together. I could hardly put the book down.