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    The Collector's Apprentice: A Novel
    The Collector's Apprentice: A Novel
    The Collector's Apprentice: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Collector's Apprentice: A Novel

    Written by B. A. Shapiro

    Narrated by Xe Sands

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    It's the summer of 1922, and nineteen-year-old Paulien Mertens finds herself in Paris-broke, disowned, and completely alone. Everyone in Belgium, including her own family, believes she stole millions in a sophisticated con game perpetrated by her then-fiance, George Everard. To protect herself from the law and the wrath of those who lost everything, she creates a new identity, a Frenchwoman named Vivienne Gregsby, and sets out to recover her father's art collection, prove her innocence-and exact revenge on George.

    When the eccentric and wealthy American art collector Edwin Bradley, who is based on real life museum founder Albert Barnes, offers Vivienne the perfect job, she is soon caught up in the Parisian world of post-Impressionists and expatriates-including Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse, with whom Vivienne becomes romantically entwined. As she travels between Paris and Philadelphia, where Bradley is building an art museum, her life becomes even more complicated: George returns with unclear motives . . . and then Vivienne is arrested for Bradley's murder.

    B. A. Shapiro has made the historical art thriller her own. In The Collector's Apprentice, she gives us an unforgettable tale about the lengths to which people will go for their obsession, whether it be art, money, love, or vengeance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 16, 2018
    ISBN9781684416479
    The Collector's Apprentice: A Novel
    Author

    B. A. Shapiro

    B.A. SHAPIRO is the author of The Art Forger, which was a New York Times bestseller, a #1 Indie Next Pick and the winner of the 2013 New England Book Award, among many other honours. Writing as Barbara Shapiro, she is also the author of five suspense novels and one non-fiction book. She lives in Boston and teaches creative writing at Northeastern University. Web: bashapirobooks.com Facebook: BAShapirobooks Twitter: @ba_shapiro

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    Reviews for The Collector's Apprentice

    4/5

    63 ratings8 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Paulien has been severely wronged and she now finds herself alone in Paris with no money, no friends and her family thinking she has stolen their priceless art collection. To make matters worse it was her fiance who perpetrated the con that led to the loss of the art. Paulien is determined to get to the bottom of things so she makes herself over into Vivienne and she sets out to get her family’s art back and extract revenge on her fiance.Fortunately Vivienne is perfectly suited for a job in the art world as she was raised in a world surrounded by great art and he father made sure to educate her about art and artists. When she is offered a job by a wealthy American collector she jumps at the chance and is soon helping him and attending soirees with Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse. She and Matisse are soon much more than friends.Her life becomes a whirlwind of travel between Europe and Philadelphia helping to set up a new museum with her American, Edwin Bradley. But life is never simple, nor is the course of love. Her ex fiance shows up again, but why? Before she can find out he ends up dead and she is the main suspect. Will she be able to finish her work with Bradley? Will she get out from under the murder charges? And where is her father’s art?Oh, this was a book full of intrigue and mystery. And art – lots of art, whether stolen or not it is the focus of the story. The book is loosely based on real events and I always enjoy a story with a grounding in reality. I found the characters to be interesting and unique. Ms. Shapiro knows how to bring a time period and place alive with her writing. I found myself all wrapped up in the excitement of travel between countries at a time when such travel was far more interesting than it is now. It all came alive as I turned the pages. The ending was not what I was expecting but it was satisfying.
    • 3/5
      Okay. Loosely based historical fiction. Could not connect with characters.
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting work of historical fiction based on the Barnes Museum now in Philadelphia. The characters will well developed, and I liked that the book was not chronological. I also liked reading about the personalities of historical figures.
    • 5/5
      The Collector's Apprentice reawakened my interest in and love or art. Since I especially love Impressionist and post-Impressionist art and had recently been to the actual museum that the fictional museum in the book was based on, the book appealed to me all the more. Thus, the book communicates to me much more than its mere plot, storyline and theme.
      The story the novel portrays centers around love and betrayal. But there are really several love stories in this book, each dealing with different kinds of love. First, there is the love of a daughter for her father. next is the platonic love between the two main characters of the book. Then, there is the manipulative kind of love between the villain and the protagonist, the tope of love that is really based on the ego needs of one of the lovers. And there is also the kind of reciprocal love where each partner truly loves the other in spite of the difficulty and possible impossibility of being joined for a lifetime.
      Beyond the kinds of love that people experience with one another, the novel deals deeply with the type of passionate love one person can feel for something outside them selves. It this case, that thing is art, particularly Impressionism, but it could have just as easily been love of music, dance, poetry, or any of the more everyday experiences of life such as cooking, cars, books, hiking, surfing or anything else that stirs the soul and awakens the emotions of the person involved.
      I was disappointed in the last few chapters of the book where it seemed that too much happened too quickly and a bit too contrived by the author, but those chapters were at least redeemed by both eh final chapter and the elements of plot and story discussed above.
      Now that I have read the book, I am anxious to learn more about art, to understand it better and to then experience more of it in the many places it is found.
    • 4/5
      Another readable art history novel from Shapiro, this one (very, very) loosely based on the collection of Philadelphia's Albert Barnes. Lots of famous-people cameos and that sort of thing.
    • 4/5
      Set in the art world of the 1920s, this novel combines mystery, romance, and history in the story of a young woman caught in a scam. Paulien is initially betrayed by her lover, whose pyramid scheme wipes out her family's fortune and causes her to flee to Paris and change her name to Vivienne. After a time, Vivienne becomes the apprentice to a wealthy art collection Bradley, who establishes an exclusive school in Philadelphia focused on art appreciation. However, Vivienne is still haunted by her scheming lover and when Bradley dies suddenly, she finds herself accused of his murder. Interesting reading, and a book that makes me want to visit the Barnes Foundation, on which is this book is loosely based.
    • 4/5
      Paulien has been severely wronged and she now finds herself alone in Paris with no money, no friends and her family thinking she has stolen their priceless art collection. To make matters worse it was her fiance who perpetrated the con that led to the loss of the art. Paulien is determined to get to the bottom of things so she makes herself over into Vivienne and she sets out to get her family’s art back and extract revenge on her fiance.Fortunately Vivienne is perfectly suited for a job in the art world as she was raised in a world surrounded by great art and he father made sure to educate her about art and artists. When she is offered a job by a wealthy American collector she jumps at the chance and is soon helping him and attending soirees with Gertrude Stein and Henri Matisse. She and Matisse are soon much more than friends.Her life becomes a whirlwind of travel between Europe and Philadelphia helping to set up a new museum with her American, Edwin Bradley. But life is never simple, nor is the course of love. Her ex fiance shows up again, but why? Before she can find out he ends up dead and she is the main suspect. Will she be able to finish her work with Bradley? Will she get out from under the murder charges? And where is her father’s art?Oh, this was a book full of intrigue and mystery. And art – lots of art, whether stolen or not it is the focus of the story. The book is loosely based on real events and I always enjoy a story with a grounding in reality. I found the characters to be interesting and unique. Ms. Shapiro knows how to bring a time period and place alive with her writing. I found myself all wrapped up in the excitement of travel between countries at a time when such travel was far more interesting than it is now. It all came alive as I turned the pages. The ending was not what I was expecting but it was satisfying.
    • 5/5
      First love, so full of happiness and promise for the future, but for 19 year old Paulien Mertens who has to runaway from her home in Brussels, and is now hiding in Paris, all she is left with is heartbreak and a tiny hope that her fiancé didn’t deliberately take her family fortune and destroy their future together.In Paris, Paulien re-invents herself as Vivienne, and she falls back on the one thing she loves; Art. From the time she was a child her father filled their home with masterpieces from well known artists, and a small collection of Impressionistic artwork that art critics didn’t like; but she loved them. Wanting to feel that connection to her father, she looks for jobs in galleries, and starts modeling for painters. Poor but safe, she meets a wealthy American Art Collector and her destiny changes again. With Dr. Edwin Bradley she is brought into the inner circle of the 1920’s art scene at Gertrude Stein’s house. As Dr. Bradley recognizes her expertise, he wants her to help him in Philadelphia with his newly acquired art collection. To follow him to America gives her a great opportunity to realize her dreams, but can she leave behind everything familiar and the lingering doubts about her fiancé? When I was offered this book I knew nothing about the story, the title was enough to peak my interest. I had read B. A. Shapiro’s The Art Forger which was based on a true story, and I loved it because I’m married to an artist who loves “behind the scenes” art history and I could ask him about the people and places she wrote about. So I was a few chapters into this book before I realized it sounded familiar and when I told him about the storyline and that it reminded me of a documentary we saw, he told me it was about the Barnes Collection. At the end of the novel, the author goes into more detail about how it is loosely based on Albert Barnes and his assistant. The author does a beautiful job bringing this time period to life; I got caught up in the characters lives and the blurring of motives. Even though it was frustrating, I liked how she didn’t let the reader see everything at once and kept all the story-lines moving until the end. The Collector’s Apprentice is a painting with words that took many complex layers of color to complete. 5 stars