Peachy Reads

I may be a sucker for novels set in World War II, so I could not resist picking up All the Light We Cannot See .  It follows the fate of two children, one a blind Parisian girl named Marie Laure whose father works in a natural history museum as the keeper of the keys. The other child is Werner, a young orphan living with his sister in the Ruhrgebiet.  As the children mature and Hitler’s war machine grinds into gear, their paths eventually cross in the French town of St. Malo.  A third strand of the narrative is the legend of a storied diamond, the curse of which seems to shadow Marie Laure’s evacuation from Paris, and eventually brings her and Werner together. Far more compelling than the fate of the diamond is the fascinating story of these two war children and the history that swirls around them. This was one of those books that will probably rate as an all-time favorite of mine.  It was just so good from start to finish. Similar: Suite Francaise, Sarah’s Key, Atonement

The brazen theft of a number of masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 is the factual context for this complex yet enjoyable thriller.  Claire Roth is a talented artist who has had a checkered history that has more or less blackballed her in the art world, closing doors to competitions and gallery exhibitions, and stalling her career.  She makes ends meet by recreating copies of masterpieces for an internet firm called Reproduction.com. A Faustian bargain with a Back Bay gallery owner capitalizes on Claire’s talents as a forger to copy a stolen masterpiece from the Gardner museum—her task is to recreate a Degas from one of the paintings taken in 1990—or is it even an original Degas?  Her talents as both an artist and a researcher are undisputed and when her forged copy is accepted as the recovered original, things start to get really interesting. I would never have thought that this book on art forgery would be the page-turner it was!  I liked t