I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would recommend it to others as a beach or cozy couch read. I give it three stars because it's good, not great, and creates a confusion between fact and fiction.

Claire, an up-and-coming Boston artist who makes a living copying famous works of art for a reproduction company, is asked by an art dealer to make a copy of a painting, a painting that turns out to be one of the works of art stolen from the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum in 1992. Fact: there was a major art heist there. Fiction: this particular piece of art by Degas.

As Claire wrestles with the ethics of what she is doing she relives the angst of her relationship with a married man, who sold a piece of art she did to MoMA, passing it off as his own. Of course nothing good comes of that relationship, and it seems Claire is doomed in relationships and in the art world forever...or is she?

Personally, I loved this book. It had a sensational blend between surviving as an artist, sculpting your own singular identity without having to rely or be dependent on a man (there’s some backstory here with our protagonist), and a crafty art heist, a mystery on top of mystery. If you adore fiction novels about the art world and strong, relatable female characters, then this is the one.

Thank goodness I recently went to the Chicago Institute of Art or I would have been pretty lost in terms of the painters mentioned in the book. I thought Claire was highly naive, but otherwise I enjoyed the book. In the end she herself will never know whether it was her art that appeals or the notoriety, and that can be a hard pill to take.

Cute.
Bostony.

A fascinating fictionalized version of the art theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Set in Boston (obviously) with a lot of local color. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

It held my interest enough to finish it. It was split into 3 different parts: main characters past, the art past and the present. The past kept me wondering what happened to get things to the present point. The present parts weren't as grabbing for me. Mainly because I couldn't really get into feeling for the characters.