I read this book as part of the D&I Book Club at work and it was not my first choice for this quarter's selection because it's just not the type of book that normally grabs me but I kept an open mind about it going in and...it still never really grabbed me. While of a Black woman passing in both a white and male-dominated world sounds interesting to me, it was really this particular world that never grabbed me. The glittering world of well-moneyed collectors of antique books (and sometimes artwork) is just somewhere I had no desire to visit and I was far less charmed by the men Belle rubbed elbows with than she was. This was especially true with both her love story with an art historian and he flirtation with her boss (J.P. Morgan, one in a long line of robber barons). Not only was the romance underbaked, these men were just awful.

There is an author's note at the end of the book that goes into detail about the various plot points in the book and how they are related to historical facts that are known about its protagonist and I couldn't help but wonder if the authors were so focused on being accurate in their portrayal that they didn't allow for any real depth on the page. There were so many characters in this novel and yet none of them ever felt fully realized to me. It felt like I was just hitting points on a chronological map. And it seemed like they were also so enamored with the woman they were writing about that they never really allowed her to be real person, which is an issues I have with a lot of fictionalized biographies.