The Lady in Gold

Maybe more like 3.5 stars, but I'm not willing to bump this one up to 4 like I have some others... This was a very interesting book and parts of it were really interesting and enjoyable. I really enjoyed reading about early 20th century Vienna, Adele, and Klimt. The battle for the painting at the end was really interesting too, but I wound up coming out of that hating everyone... Other parts just dragged on and on and was very redundant at times. I couldn't always keep track of who was who because there were so many people. And there were some very poorly worded sentences and paragraphs; some I had to reread a few times to understand properly. There were also a lot of typos that I would have hoped would've been caught before a second printing... A pretty uneven book for me. It had its good parts and its bad, but I am glad I read it.

The first section was good, I learned a lot and it was a fun read. But I wasn't really in the mood for the Holocaust stuff, and certainly not dozens of pages block-quoting fake-cheerful letters between spouses on either side of the barbed wire. Found myself spending more time googling photos of the people and paintings than reading the book itself, and that's a sure sign that it's time to move on.