Stephanie Storey

Ugh. I should have known when the phrase "egg-based tempera" showed up that I was dealing with an author who either thought her readers were idiots—or didn't know how to write.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be both.

Stephanie Storey knows her history, there's no doubt about it. Interesting tidbits grace scenes (making it almost worthwhile to finish in order to learn something a bit esoteric to enamor at your next dinner party), but her attempt to novelize the sensational in the vibrant, nail-biting world of 16th century Italy falls flat. The characters were stilted, the prose neophyte, and stakes shallow. When working with historical figures where people pretty much know the arc of their lives, an author has an especially difficult time convincing readers of "stakes", and when you don't have the prose or characters to match, it's boring.

Another issue I had with the novel was the modernity of the characters. Speech is almost unaffected, a sort of quasi-formal dialogue that I guess is supposed to impress the readers into the 16th century, but was obviously lazy. The word "pyrotechnics" somehow got into the final draft, (which took me 3 seconds to look up was a 19th-century invention) and just illustrated to me how little Storey cared to make this more authentic than it had to be. There just didn't seem to be an attempt at making it more historically accurate than the dressed-up scenes Storey felt either was comfortable with or just enough to fool lazy readers. It reminded me of the BBC Musketeers adaptation and the like, with scenes moving to the next without much consequence, a story first and foremost without much "art" to the process of novel writing. I'd be hard-pressed to find even one theme.

It's two stars because the novel had potential. It seemed incredibly accurate and wasn't head-hitting-the-wall bad, but it was just so generic it left me insulted. It felt lazy and amateurish, and I can only hope Storey writes some sort of art history non-fiction. I'd read that over a novel any day.… (más)

This is a novel about the great artists Leonardo and Michelangelo. The author tells her story using historical sources when they are available, and using her own imagination when they are not. The relationship between the artists, which isn't known, is the base of the story.

The period covered is 1501-1505 when both artists were living in Florence. During those years Leonardo created one of the world's greatest paintings, Mona Lisa, and Michelangelo created David, one of the world's greatest sculptures.

The author includes a coda that gives us basic facts about the artists after 1505 and includes notes that tell why she made the decisions she did when facts weren't available. In her notes she writes: Oil and Marble is based on twenty years of research and grounded in real history, but it is unapologetically a work of fiction.

I liked this, there isn't a lot of depth, but it's a good story, one that provokes thought and possibly inspires more reading on the artists. She gave us a little teaser at the end by introducing Raphael, the subject of her second novel, I already have it on my shelf.… (más)