A Portrait of Emily Price by Katherine Reay

This is my third Reay book I've read this month, and I haven't loved any of them like I loved Lizzy and Jane and Dear Mr. Knightley, which I read years ago and don't even remember now. So either, I have to re-read those books and decide whether my tastes have changed and they weren't as good as I remember, or maybe I just didn't love them as much as I thought, or, maybe they were just better than the other books Reay has written. I didn't dislike any of them, but none of them have gripped me like those other two did. This book was about Emily, an art restorer who is really good at her job (a much more interesting job than I ever thought of, though--that was a cool part of the book, learning about that) and who loves art, who meets Ben, an Italian visiting America for a few weeks, and falls in love and spur-of-the-moment marries him and moves to Italy with him, and then things are harder than she thought they would be with his family when she moves there. I liked Ben and Emily together, and liked how they worked things out and worked together. I don't usually like rushed romances, but that didn't bother me in this story.

I just didn't feel like the story flowed very well--I liked the part set in Atlanta, where she was working as a restorer and helping Ben with his restaurant, and then I liked the part in Italy, where she was learning about this new culture and family and restoring other art, but I just didn't see how they fit together very well. They felt like two completely different stories, like maybe Reay should have written them longer made the second half a sequel to her first half. It felt like Emily didn't really have emotions--she did, but not nearly as many as I felt like she should have when she, oh, married a practical stranger, left her home country, and moved in with a family of strangers in a country where she doesn't speak the language and knows NOBODY except the stranger she married. She seems like she just goes along and is sad sometimes that her mother-in-law doesn't like her, but doesn't seem to mind anything else. And she all of a sudden doesn't have a job, and it is totally fine because she's married now and still gets to restore art for fun and for free in the church down the street? And all of a sudden, moving to Italy fixes her bad painting skills and now she can paint masterpieces and gets her own art show? And I don't feel like the reference to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man works in this book--it plays such a minor role in the story, and I don't feel like she really understood it, and I feel like it was faking it to make it a part of the title of the book.

All of that makes it sound like I hated the book... I didn't. I liked a lot of the ideas of the plot, the characters, and the setting of Italy (who wouldn't??). I just never really bought into it and didn't feel very excited about finding out what happened.