The Muse

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However, I wasn’t sure about a couple of things. For example, Odelle’s dialect when she talks to her childhood friend. I can’t vouch for it’s authenticity: the one person from Trinidad I talk to on a daily basis speak nothing – absolutely nothing – like that, but he’s an Indo-Trinidadian, unlike Odelle, and he comes from a slightly later time, so I guess it’s possible. However, whenever Odelle speaks to the reader in her own voice, she sounds nothing like that, so it’s a bit strange. She either speaks like this naturally or she doesn’t, but the constant switching doesn’t make much sense.

Do you have a body if no one is there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn't. I was just a mind, floating around the rooms." The civil war parts were boring, and it felt like a dull history lesson that you could nap your way through. I believe the author could've done a better job to make it more interesting and fit for a novel. The author expertly and quite beautifully weaves the two stories together, seemingly only connected by a work of art, as the novel progresses, the two stories are knitted tighter and tighter together until each and every character has their own place in both parts.

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Burton engages in a fair bit of parallelism. Odelle is an immigrant to London. Olive is a foreigner in Spain. Both are creatives, Odelle with writing, Olive with painting. Both Olive and Odelle hide their work from most people. Both find inspiration in a love interest, and feel unable to create in the absence of that other. Both have their work exposed to the world without their consent. Both Odelle and Olive imagine paradise in a place that is anything but. Olive sees Spain as Eden-ic and uses that in one very lush painting. But she does not see the turmoil that underlies the country until it is almost upon her. Odelle sees London as a sort of literary nirvana, but has had to endure years of racism and limited opportunity. She does, however, experience a Shangri-La moment in the lush growth of a London garden. Other items to keep an eye out for are characters projecting their expectations, good and bad, onto others. There are several parent/child, mentor/acolyte connections at play. Seeing people or things in terms of fairy tales, religious and secular, pops up a few times as well.

it's an excellent book, clearly very well-researched, and if the appeal of the storylines is a little unbalanced, that's probably just my personal preferences talking. it's a little more handled and predictable than The Miniaturist, but her writing is gorgeous enough that it didn't stop me from loving the guts out of it. I really enjoyed Jessie Burton's first novel, The Miniaturist, but I absolutely adored The Muse. It is a gripping, evocative and beautiful book, with characters who come alive and a plot that is unpredictable and surprising and wonderfully crafted. Absolutely wonderful, a book that I will be recommending to everyone I meet Many thanks to author Jessie Burton via publisher Pan Macmillan for a copy of The Muse in exchange for my honest review.Burton chooses two unusual cultures for her settings: 1960’s London, from the viewpoint of a Caribbean immigrant, and pre-Civil War Spain in 1936, also seen from an outsider’s point of view. Burton’s research is impressive, particularly with the Spanish part of the story. It adds a lot of color to the story, though it does occasionally bog down the pace. The Muse touches on social issues in both eras: the divisions in Spain that led to the civil war, as well as the more subtle racism that limits Odelle’s opportunities in London and make her grateful to get a job as a typist. The Muse is split in chronology and perspective, varying between Odelle, a typist for an art gallery in 196o's London, and Olive, the artistic daughter of bourgeois parents holidaying in a 1930's Spain on the brink of Civil War. The pair never meet but their stories are linked through the decades in a way that will only be revealed as this story comes to a close, in an extraordinary and emotional conclusion. Yes, historical fiction fans – I think you will really enjoy it! Now I’m off to add The Miniaturist to my to-read pile!

I thought London would mean prosperity and welcome. A Renaissance place. Glory and success. I thought leaving for England was the same as stepping out of my house and onto the street, just a slightly colder street where a beti with a brain could live next door to Elizabeth the Queen." So many novelists over these last few years, it seems are telling stories from dual time frames and if done right there can be a meaningful connection between them . I thought the story had so much promise at first. It touched on some topics that would make for interesting discussion - the view of women artists in the 1930's , who and why does the artist, painter or writer, create for - themselves, for outside praise and recognition? We glimpse civil war in Spain and it also touches on racial issues in the 1960's in England. So there is much in the way of food for thought. On top of that there is a mystery over a painting, love interests, and the hold on the reader waiting to see how Olive's life in a town in Spain in 1936 would connect with Odelle's in London in 1967 . Is there ever such a thing as a whole story, or an artist's triumph, a right way to look through the glass? It all depends on where the light falls.” Set in Calvinist Amsterdam, it follows a new bride in a strange country and the miniaturist who foreshadowed her life with his creations. The story focuses on the discover, in 1967, of a long lost painting by Isaac Robles, a young artist whose life is pretty much a mystery, and it follows Odelle's search for information about it and its painter. This search brings her to Olive's story, set in Arazuelo in 1937, just a few months before Isaac's mysterious death.

The Sydney Morning Herald

The author, Jessie Burton, has a brilliant ability to put fancy words together in sophisticated forms and I respect her for it. Her prose game is very decent and shows the potentials and capabilities of an illustrious writer, but still not in a mind-blowing way if you get what I mean. That said, the story didn't live up to her beautified writing style although it had so many attractive elements.