Reviews with content warning for Infidelity - The Personal Librarian

A beautiful life story! I enjoyed reading this book. Bell is the personal Librarian of JP Morgan. She is responsible for curating most of his collection. Bell has a secret she is black and is passing for white in New York.

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marrireadsandrambles's review against another edition

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informative slow-paced

2.5

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kaycie51782's review

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emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book tells the story of JP Morgan's personal librarian, a Black woman who passes herself as Portuguese in early 1900s New York. It is a fascinating story that was incredibly eye opening. They tell the story of how they are able to live as a white family, not shying away from that trauma. The book talks about the immediate post Civil War South, and the hope that was sadly quickly dashed.

This book covers a lot of deep topics, and it doesn't hold much back. Be warned: there blatant racism, misogyny, heavy alcohol consumption, abortion, abandonment...

My main criticism of the book is that it's told in first person, but it very deliberately and overtly points things out. I think telling it in omniscient third person would have felt less like I was hearing a summary than a story. It's like in video games where the next person you need to talk to is highlighted, the author basically points and says "Look at this" instead of molding it into the story.

The book is less about what is in the library (though it is discussed) and more about how she loves through the world carefully, deliberately, and choosing to hide in plain sight. It was a fascinating look at life in 1900s New York as a woman, moving in orbit around the ultra rich (Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, etc.) but being constantly terrified of having it all taken away.

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satashii's review

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informative slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I have more than a few issues with this book and I’m struggling to understand a lot of the glowing reviews. For one, the first person narrative felt like the story was all tell and very little show. There was a lot of exposition via stilted conversations that were not very believable and (quite honestly) I went back and forth between finding things tawdry and immature from a writing standpoint. For a book labeled historical fiction I was pretty sure I was reading a young adult novel that was ticking off boxes of things modern best sellers must have.

I was not impressed—hence the star rating. Belle does not undergo much character growth and still comes off as a Mary Sue to the very end.

The main character, Belle, is a real person but the historical accuracy suffers from the choice of first person narrative. A quick search on her name told me a lot more about her than this book did and I don’t think the book really did her story any favors. There is more than enough primary source material to have written a much better and fuller story. The book itself is overlong, the climax happens at about the 70-75% mark and then we spend another sixty pages on stuff that really didn’t feel necessary. A more focused book on one element of Belle’s life would have been more appropriate for the word count. I’ve never read anything else by these authors but after this I’m not really inclined to.

While I was sympathetic and interested in the viewpoint of a white-passing black woman who became a femminist icon of the suffragettes… this story really didn’t go into hardly any details about that. it’s a side show to the story of Belle having cringily written romantic attachments to much older men. It’s vaguely mentioned that she pretends to be younger than she is at the very beginning by six years but I wasn’t sure if she continued this ruse in addition to her other ones. Add in the trauma she undergoes and… then what? There’s so many things stuffed in by telling the reader about them that they don’t have very much emotional impact.

Mostly, this book just made me frustrated and tired. There’s a better story to be told here than the one I just read. I would not have finished the book if my bookclub hadn’t chosen it as our monthly read.

So one star for teaching me things about Belle’s father and another star for making me very curious about Anne Morgan and her friends. It sounds like they were all very remarkable woman and I suspect Belle was as well…. I just didn’t like this version of her very much.

I think I need another palette cleanser book to read after this one.

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karyan1's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

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meganpbennett's review against another edition

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hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I don't read a lot of historical fiction, and I don't normally enjoy fictional books written about real people. This goes double when a large portion of the historical "facts" are presented through conjecture and inductive/deductive reasoning. Or when something important in the real person's real life is changed because it works better for the story.

This book has all of those things, following the fictionalized life of Belle de Costa Greene, the librarian for J. P. Morgan's library. Only, Belle de Costa Greene.... was a black woman, passing for white in a world where being caught meant death. Not much is known about her, though Morgan's life is rather well documented. My hometown library did a "one book, one community" read with this book, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to read a book I would not have otherwise picked up to read. It was a very interesting read, though I found it to be rather on the slow side.

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