Magnolia Palace, The: A Novel

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I could tell from the beginning that she was going to be one of those characters that I didn't always agree with, but I cared about nonetheless.

Set over two timelines around The Frick Museum it follows the lives of Lillian/Angelica in the past and Veronica in the 1960s. Hers was one of the smaller apartments in the building, with only one bedroom, where she and her mother had slept. She learns to manage the household, organize functions, handle the household accounts, and much more.Both of the young female main characters are models with unstable financial situations, without anyone to depend on other than themselves. Davis smoothly combines fact with fiction, and offers beautiful descriptions of the family’s art collection. Davis says in her Author's Note how she "likes to layer a fictional story over the scaffolding of historical facts," and she has done so quite cleverly in The Magnolia Palace. Looking for clues about the Frick family and they try to solve the mystery of what happened to the rare and expensive Magnolia diamond, it went missing in 1919 and hasn't been seen since.

Work is drying up and Lillian has trouble paying the rent and then finds herself a suspect in the death of her landlord’s wife. As with all Davis books, they center around a New York City landmark, that I usually know nothing to very little about, and this particular book surrounds The Frick Museum and the life of Helen Clay Frick, a woman whom I had not heard of 72 hours ago, but I wish to learn more about fiercely, because in this novel that woman is a true spitfire, and I just completely fell in love with the way Fiona wrote her. Fifty years later in 1966, a young and inexperienced English model, Veronica Weber, found herself at the Frick museum for a photo shoot. A captivating story whose characters are richly drawn, The Magnolia Palace pays particular attention to those who might go unnoticed: the deaf private secretary, the museum intern, the organ player.

I found it hard to follow the story, which was nothing special and couldn't connect to anyone in this novel. It is her figure that was the muse for all the statues mentioned in this story and hundreds of others. When a case of mistaken identity works in her favor, she accepts a job at the Frick mansion as the personal assistant to Helen Frick, daughter of the industrialist. Fiona Davis has managed to carve a niche in the historical fiction genre and I highly recommend checking out her books.