Review - Still Lives

Still Lives
by Maria Hummel
release date 6/5/2018
275 pages
Chapter length:  medium
1 out of 5 stars

According to the publisher, "Kim Lord is an avant-garde figure, feminist icon, and agent provocateur in the L.A. art scene. Her groundbreaking new exhibition Still Lives is comprised of self-portraits depicting herself as famous, murdered women—the Black Dahlia, Chandra Levy, Nicole Brown Simpson, among many others—and the works are as compelling as they are disturbing, implicating a culture that is too accustomed to violence against women.

As the city’s richest art patrons pour into the Rocque Museum’s opening night, all the staff, including editor Maggie Richter, hope the event will be enough to save the historic institution’s flailing finances. Except Kim Lord never shows up to her own gala. Fear mounts as the hours and days drag on and Lord remains missing. Suspicion falls on the up-and-coming gallerist Greg Shaw Ferguson, who happens to be Maggie’s ex. A rogue’s gallery of eccentric art world figures could also have motive for the act and, as Maggie gets drawn into her own investigation of Lord’s disappearance, she’ll come to suspect all of those closest to her.

Set against a culture that often fetishizes violence, Still Lives is a page-turning exodus into the art world’s hall of mirrors, and one woman’s journey into the belly of an industry flooded with money and secrets."  

I chose this book as a Book of the Month Club pick for two reasons:  1.  I'm pretty interested in art, and haven't come across too many works of fiction centered on this subject.  2.  Reese Witherspoon chose it for her book club, and I love my girl Reese!

Unfortunately, Reese let me down.  This is an example of a book that, on paper (no pun intended) should be really great but, in reality, does not work at all.

The book's biggest flaw is its characters.  The narrator, Maggie, is extremely flat.  She's supposed to be a young women getting over a break-up in the midst of L.A.'s fancy art scene, but the character came off simply as being an unlikable amalgam of cliches related to brokenhearted women.  She is too one-dimensional to be relateable at all to the reader.

The ex-boyfriend, Greg Shaw Ferguson, is supposed to be at least charming enough that two women were in love with him, yet he seems to simply be a weird, creepy guy that would have trouble keeping one girlfriend, let alone two.

Kim Lord is also extremely unlikable, though that is most likely due to only being viewed through Maggie's lens of being romantic rivals.  Perhaps Kim would have been more likable, or at least more multi-dimensional, if the reader was given a less biased perspective of her character.  

While the concept here is really good - a murder that takes in the high-powered West Coast art scene - the characters killed my interest in the plot and I struggled to get through it.

While I didn't care for this book, it may be of interest to fans of contemporary art.