Hello everyone, today I am reviewing Restrike by Reba White Williams for TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

About the book (from the publisher): Cousins Coleman and Dinah Greene moved to New York City after college to make their mark on the art world, and they have – Coleman as the editor of an influential arts magazine, and Dinah as the owner of a print gallery in Greenwich Village. But challenges mount as Coleman discovers a staff writer selling story ideas to a competitor, while Dinah’s Green Gallery slips into the red. When billionaire Heyward Bain arrives announcing plans to fund a find print museum, Coleman is intrigued and plans to publish an article about him, and Dinah hopes to sell him prints. Then, unexpectedly, swindlers invade the art world to grab some of Bain’s money, and a print dealer dies under mysterious circumstances. Risking her own life, Coleman sets out to unravel the last deception threatening her, her friends, and the once-tranquil world of fine art prints.

My review: What do I know about the art world, especially the world of fine art prints? Very little. But it is a world that the author knows well and that knowledge permeates every page of this mystery. The noun restrike, by the way, refers to “a fine art print made later than the first edition, usually inferior, and often made after the artist’s death.” Coleman and Dinah Greene are written in great detail, as are the other colorful characters in this book. (New York City is also a character, as Williams clearly loves and adores that great city.) We are in a world of money and privilege here: billionaires, millionaires, powerful collectors, wealthy patrons. Even Coleman and Dinah, who had a hardscrabble and poor childhood in the South, are now relatively well off. There is a fun element of ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ here.

Though the male characters are interesting and well written, it is the female characters who hold much of the power in this book and I found that refreshing. They are smart, savvy, successful – and brave.

The plot is fairly complex and Williams does a good job of weaving together all the plot points and webs of intrigue. I am an avid mystery reader, as you know, and I really like it when I can’t figure out who the bad guy is until the reveal. Though I had an idea, I wasn’t absolutely sure. Kudos to Williams for creating a complicated enough plot with several potential villains. I was fully immersed in this unknown-to-me world and that is due to Williams vivid characters, a detailed plot and her ability to create a setting that comes alive.

I have a couple of quibbles. Some of the plot points and character connections were just too far-fetched for me – they fell off my ‘believability scale.’ They didn’t ring true. Resolutions for some of the characters were curiously unsatisfying. But that may be deliberate on Williams’ part, as this book is the first in a series that will feature Coleman and Dinah. Perhaps we’ll see these characters again.

In the end, this book was well written with a plot that kept me reading until the end. I really enjoyed it. And I look forward to more of this series. Williams, who has led a fascinating life, is an author to be watched.

I’m sure you will enjoy this debut mystery.

About the author: Reba White Williams has written articles for American Artist, Art and Auction, Print Quarterly and Journal of the Print World. She served on the Print Committees of The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum and The Whitney Museum. She was a member of the Editorial Board of Print Quarterly and is an Honorary Keeper of American Prints at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University.

Williams grew up in Mississippi, Tennessee and North Carolina. She graduated from Duke University and her ambition at 21 years old led her to New York, where she began writing about art, business and finance. She holds numerous post-graduate degrees.

Fine Art Print Collecting has been a major activity for Williams and her husband and they assembled what has been called the largest collections of prints by American artists in private hands. They circulated seventeen exhibitions from their collection to more than one hundred museums worldwide, Williams writing the exhibition catalogues. In 2009, most of their collection – about 5000 prints – was donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

She and her husband founded the annual Willie Morris Award for best Southern fiction, now in its sixth year. With her husband and their dog, Muffin, who is fictionalized in her books, Williams divides her time between New York, Connecticut and Palm Springs.

Regretfully, there is no giveaway for this book. It’s available in paperback from your favorite bookseller.

Today I am reviewing The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson for TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

About the book (from the publisher): Three smart young women – the scholarly Ruth, her poet roommate Lucy, and their exotic, provocative neighbor Anna – are obsessed with games of all kinds. They’ve devoted themselves to both the academic study of play and the design of games based on the secret history of the neighborhood around Columbia University, from Grant’s Tomb to the former insane asylum that once stood where the campus is now.

When Anna’s mysterious brother Anders gets involved and introduces live-action role-playing based on a classic Greek tragedy, theory goes into practice and the stakes are raised. Told in a variety of formats – including Gchat and blog posts – that bring the fraught drama of Euripides screaming into the twenty-first century, The Magic Circle is an intellectual thriller like no other.

My review: I love a good mystery and/or thriller. You clearly know that about me from my book reviewing history. But I must admit that this book was a challenge. First of all, I know virtually nothing about the world of gaming. I understand that it is a higher-stakes version of ‘Let’s Pretend’ – that simplest of games that I played as a child. And my own work involves a lot of role-playing as I work in the theater. I can play ‘Let’s Pretend’ with the best of them and am paid to do so. So these concepts are not new to me, or to anyone, really. However, the computer driven, ‘virtual’ world of gaming is foreign to me. So it was with some real curiosity that I started reading this novel.

Jenny Davidson is a talented writer – let me say that at the start. I really enjoyed the coming to life of the world surrounding Columbia University – a world that Davidson describes in great detail. I also learned a lot about a subject that was new to me. That being said, the story was slow-going for me. Sometimes it is told in the third person, at others, narrated by Lucy or Ruth. There are also entries from Anna’s blog and transcripts from Gchats, which reflect the 21st century, high-tech world these women are a part of.

Here’s my problem with the novel. Ultimately, I didn’t care about these characters. I felt distanced from them. This may have been purposeful on the author’s part, but if I don’t care about at least one of the characters, you’ve lost me. Davidson gives us tantalizing details about Ruth, Lucy and Anna, but not enough to bring me completely into the world of the novel. Not enough to make me like any of them or root for any of them. Call me traditional, but this emotional distancing, this observation, doesn’t work for me as a reader. And that made it very hard for me to finish reading the book. It made the reading work, rather than pleasure.

There’s lots of drinking, some drugs, and some graphic scenes that might upset you. I didn’t have a problem with them, as they were clearly a part of the world in which these women exist, though I suspect that some of it was written to tantalize and even shock the reader.

The idea behind this book is fascinating. When the lines get blurred between reality and fantasy, when a game becomes all too real, what happens? What are the ramifications? I love the idea of the novel, and I very much wanted to be caught up in the story. I was sorry that it never really happened for me.

Maybe it’s generational? Maybe this book needs a younger reader? Someone who exists in and knows the world of gaming? But that theory seems silly. Every book I read creates a ‘new’ world for me and I’m always ready to suspend disbelief and go there. That’s the joy of reading. I simply couldn’t ‘go there’ this time around.

About the author: Jenny Davidson is a professor of English at Columbia University. She is the author of the novel Heredity (2003), two YA novels, The Explosionist (2008) and Invisible Things (2010); and several academic books. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and blogs at Light Reading (jennydavidson.blogspot.com).

I’m giving away a copy of this book to one fortunate commenter. Just leave a comment on this post and I will draw a winner on Monday evening.

Happy Friday.

Today I’m reviewing Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall for TLC Book Tours. As always, I am provided with a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

From the publisher:

From an early age, Margaret Fuller dazzled New England’s intellectual elite. Her famous Conversations changed women’s sense of how they could think and live; her editorship of The Dial shaped American Romanticism.

Marshall tells the story of how Fuller, tired of Boston, accepted Horace Greeley’s offer to be the New York Tribune’s front page columnist. The move unleashed a crusading concern for the urban poor and the plight of prostitutes, and a hunger for passionate experience. In Italy as a foreign correspondent, Fuller took a secret lover, wrote dispatches on the brutal 1849 Siege of Rome, and gave birth to a son.

When all three died in a shipwreck off Fire Island shortly after Fuller’s fortieth birthday, the sense and passion of her life’s work were eclipsed by tragedy and scandal. Marshall’s inspired account brings an American heroine back to indelible life.

My review:

Before I read this biography, I was aware of the name Margaret Fuller but had no real knowledge of her life or accomplishments. And I am not usually drawn to biographies. However, Megan Marshall’s book, amazingly detailed but never boring, is one I would highly recommend. She paints a vivid picture of Fuller’s life, drawing from Fuller’s writings and the accounts of others.

Think of it: Fuller grew up in Cambridge, MA, the daughter of a lawyer and congressman who gave her a classical education in a time when Harvard, just down the road, didn’t admit women. She was brilliant and fiercely intelligent, described by some as a genius. She grew up with Oliver Wendell Holmes; she later counted Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Alcotts as her friends. She edited some of Thoreau’s writings. She was most definitely a woman ahead of her time. As her world expanded, she left Cambridge for New York to work for Horace Greeley and the New York Herald Tribune as a columnist. Eventually, she went to Europe and worked as a foreign correspondent. All this in a time where women held the traditional roles of wife and mother and weren’t expected to do much more than that. Fuller’s heroines, however, were George Sand and Mary Wollstonecraft, women who disregarded society’s conventions as to marriage. Fuller sought more. She believed strongly in the rights of women. She championed the causes of those in need. She wanted to live a fully realized life and she did.

Perhaps her best known work was Women in the Nineteenth Century, which grew out of her famous Conversations, which were seminars for women. The Dial, a Transcendentalist publication, was started by Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Born in 1810, she died at the age of 40 – too young, by far. But in that time, she forged a life that few women of that time could have hoped to imagine. Megan Marshall’s book is beautifully written. She paints a vivid portrait of her subject and recreates that era for her readers in rich detail. We see and experience life in Cambridge, New York and Rome in the first half of the 19th century. We meet those people, some rather famous to us now, that Margaret counted as her friends and colleagues. We learn much about the social ills that Margaret fought to change. And most importantly, we learn about Margaret, whose fierce intellect and passionate embrace of life led her on a groundbreaking journey.

I find her utterly fascinating. And I thank Megan Marshall for writing such a brilliant biography.

About the author:

Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared the New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, and Slate. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, Marshall teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College. She lives in Massachusetts.

If you leave a comment, you just might win a copy of this book! Make sure to leave your comment on this post. I will choose a winner on Thursday evening.

Happy Monday.