Emily Franklin
Auteur van Jenna & Jonah's Fauxmance
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How to Spell Hannukkah 1 exemplaar
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This biographical fiction covers the years 1861 to 1903 when the now-famous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was open to the public. Interspersed is the Prologue and "Intermezzos" written by Isabella in 1924 to an unnamed friend with instructions to burn letters and leave everything in the museum untouched, as well as reflecting on events from a more mature perspective. The beginning chapters, focusing on only four years, are the most detailed and cohesive; after that, I began to feel like I was just reading vignettes in each chapter, glimpses of a life and imagined letters rather than a whole, complete story. I suppose that's part of the difficulty in writing about Isabella herself - she did indeed burn letters, but left the museum as she had curated it to the city of Boston as her legacy.
Franklin chooses to focus a lot on Isabella's imagined desires, whether for a child, or friendship, or in an affair, and I found myself impatient in the repetition of her feelings of lacking when she seems to me such a bold figure who didn't really care what other people thought. Because less time is spent on her later years, this woman is less clear than the youthful one unsure of her place in society. There's also no mention of her husband Jack's paying someone to fight the Civil War in his place, the fact that some of the art she acquired was smuggled, or the moral questions of whether national treasures should become part of a personal collection (indeed, the actual accumulation of the art is described mostly in letters, without a lot of details given). These, to me, would have made much more interesting reading.… (meer)