Artifice
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A dramatic story of duplicity and resistance, betrayal and loyalty, set against the backdrop of World War II, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Light in Hidden Places.
Isa de Smit was raised in the vibrant, glittering world of her parents' small art gallery in Amsterdam, a hub of beauty, creativity, and expression, until the Nazi occupation wiped the color from her city's palette. The "degenerate" art of the Gallery de Smit is confiscated, the artists in hiding or deported, her best friend, Truus, fled to join the shadowy Dutch resistance. And masterpiece by masterpiece, the Nazis are buying and stealing her country's heritage, feeding the Third Reich's ravenous appetite for culture and art.
So when the unpaid taxes threaten her beloved but empty gallery, Isa decides to make the Nazis pay. She sells them a fake--a Rembrandt copy drawn by her talented father--a sale that sets Isa perilously close to the second most hated class of people in Amsterdam: the collaborators. Isa sells her beautiful forgery to none other than Hitler himself, and on the way to the auction, discovers that Truus is part of a resistance ring to smuggle Jewish babies out of Amsterdam.
But Truus cannot save more children without money. A lot of money. And Isa thinks she knows how to get it. One more forgery, a copy of an exquisite Vermeer, and the Nazis will pay for the rescue of the very children they are trying annihilate. To make the sale, though, Isa will need to learn the art of a master forger, before the children can be deported, and before she can be outed as a collaborator. And she finds an unlikely source to help her do it: the young Nazi soldier, a blackmailer and thief of Dutch art, who now says he wants to desert the German army.
Yet, worth is not always seen from the surface, and a fake can be difficult to spot. Both in art, and in people. Based on the true stories of Han Van Meegeren, a master art forger who sold fakes to Hermann Goering, and Johann van Hulst, credited with saving 600 Jewish children from death in Amsterdam, Sharon Cameron weaves a gorgeously evocative thriller, simmering with twists, that looks for the forgotten color of beauty, even in an ugly world.
"War, resistance, and art are Cameron's canvas; her palette is a balance of trust and perfidy, beauty and defiance, new life and old. Artifice is a vibrantly-hued and many-layered story, exploring our very human inability to spot a fake when we long to believe that the object of all our desire is the real thing." -- Elizabeth Wein, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity
* "Painterly prose...filled with rich intrigue depicts constantly shifting issues of trust in this complex, absorbing tale." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cameron (Bluebird) entwines the world of fine art and forgeries with a Dutch Resistance mission to smuggle Jewish children out of the Netherlands in this tightly plotted, suspenseful novel, set in 1943 Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Following her mother's death, 18-year-old Isa DeSmit, who was brought up in the pre-war bohemian art society by painter parents, must manage the house (once also their gallery), while navigating her father's erratic, absent-minded behavior. Lacking money for taxes and coal, Isa sells her father's forgery of a Rembrandt to high-ranking Nazis, unwittingly beginning a dangerous entanglement with Nazi soldier Michel, who claims to be planning desertion. Allowing Resistance workers Truus, her childhood friend, and rigid Willem, Truss's boyfriend, access to her home as they rescue Jewish babies entangles Isa, together with Michel, in their cause, which plunges her deeper into selling—and eventually creating—more forgeries. Painterly prose ("the deep deep cobalt of regret") filled with rich intrigue depicts constantly shifting issues of trust in this complex, absorbing tale, based on historical figures, as detailed in the author's note. All characters cue as white. Ages 12–up.
