Phoebe and the Ghost of Chagall
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Phoebe is an artist making very little money designing wine labels for a winery in Sonoma. Her house is in foreclosure, she's divorced, turning forty, and beleaguered on every front. Enter Marc Chagall s ghost, visible only to her, who appears to help her retrieve one of his own paintings that Phoebe s father found during the liberation of France. Meant for Phoebe and her mother, the painting never made it into their hands. In this debut comic novel, Phoebe and Chagall hunt down the painting in the South of France with help from a cast of characters including two sisters who are witches, a San Francisco Art dealer, and a misguided French innkeeper. Their snooping also leads Chagall to a few out of the hundred paintings that went missing during his lifetime. With skill and tension this book pits characters who appreciate art for its beauty against black market art dealers, evil collectors, and the mysterious German pawn hired to deliver the goods.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this debut novel by Koenigsdorf, the ghost of Marc Chagall appears in the soon-to-be foreclosed Sonoma home of Phoebe Rosen, a middle-aged artist earning a meager living painting labels for a winery. Chagall's "unfinished business" is to solve Phoebe's financial problems by helping her recover a painting of his that her grandfather found in Paris during WWIII but was then stolen in the chaos of the war. While the premise has the potential to unfold as a unique, paranormal mystery, Koenigsdorf's prose is clich d and her plot has too many far-fetched coincidences. Minor characters, like a gaggle of well-off housewives, seem to exist solely so Phoebe can, for the reader's benefit, explain her predicament in spurts of expository dialogue listing off "divorce, my daughter leaving the nest, my hours being cut back at the winery ." The circumstances bringing Phoebe back in contact with her grandfather's Chagall are even more unbelievable than the presence of the painter's ghost, the unexpected fruit of an invitation to join a bicycle tour of Provence. However, the story's twists and turns a pair of sister witches and an international art smuggling ring make appearances may provide enough intrigue to keep a reader's interests.
