The Lady With the Dark Hair

The Lady With the Dark Hair

Erin Bartels

Revell

     Esther Markstrom and her artist mother have always been proud of their ancestor, painter Francisco Vella. They even run a small museum and gallery dedicated to raising awareness of his scandalously underappreciated work. But when Esther reconnects with her former art history professor, she finds her once-solid family history on shaky ground as questions arise about Vella's greatest work--a portrait entitled The Lady with the Dark Hair .

     In 1879, Catalan orphan-turned-fugitive Viviana Torrens has found sanctuary serving in the home of an aging artist in Southern France. It is in his studio that she meets Francisco Vella, a Gibraltarian merchant who sells artists' pigments. When her past catches up to her, she is compelled to pose as Vella's sister and join him on his travels or be deported back to Spain to stand trial. Along the way she will discover that the many parts she has been playing in order to hide her identity have far-reaching implications she never could have foreseen.

     This dual-timeline story from award-winning author Erin Bartels takes readers from the sleepy Midwest to the sultry Mediterranean on a relentless search for truth, identity, and the freedom to follow one's dreams.

     This book is a difficult one to review. It's not my normal genre, but I took a chance on it because this author's previous book, Everything is Just Beginning, also isn't my usual reading material, but it genuinely touched me. However, The Lady With the Dark Hair...didn't, even though I could tell it was trying. At first I wondered if I simply didn't relate to the characters, but that doesn't always preclude connection, you know? Even though I didn't relate to the characters in Everything is Just Beginning either, it resonated with me. This book, unfortunately, didn't. There are a few possibilities why that could be, but I suspect part of the reason is that much of this book is very much about the experience of being a woman in a man's world, but in a way that is shifted just to the side of my own experience, my own struggles and desires, so that reading it was like trying to grasp at a common thread and just missing. I finally caught some of those threads there at the end, found a little of that common ground, but it wasn't enough to overcome the rest of the book.

     Part of this book's problem is a genuine "it's not you, it's me" issue, but there were some pacing and plot/character choices that just seemed...odd. And disconnected, almost like I was being a told a summarized story than actually living through events along with the characters. There was beauty in it, some truly insightful moments, but portions of time were skimmed over with a rapidity that made it difficult to set down roots of investment within the story. I know enough about history to know that some of the circumstances portrayed in the book are not as unbelievable as they first appear, but something about the way they were handled made them seem so. I never felt like I really followed the progress of a compelling plot or character arc, and perhaps that is because it was really just there to service a message--or rather, an exploration of an experience. As I said before, it was one that didn't really resonate with me and so it probably made me less forgiving of the book's real flaws. Honestly, the whole book left off feeling rather hollow because its conclusion didn't satisfy me in a matter of plot or theme.

     While I'm sure I won't be the only person who feels that way, I doubt I'm in the majority. All of the reviews I've seen thus far have been overwhelmingly positive, and I get it. After all, not everything does or even should resonate with everyone, and so while this one was a miss for me, I'm positive for many others that won't be the case.

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.