The Perfume Collector
A quick read, in a pattern I recognized (bouncing between two linked life histories) - but it's a pattern I like, so that's fine. The link between the two lives was easily guessed, and confirmed fairly early on for anyone paying attention, so it's not really a mystery in any sense; the pleasure of the book was watching the author unroll the revelation.I'm not a big 'scent' person, but I am a writing person, so I was intrigued by how Tessaro chose to describe smell-sensations. Unsurprisingly, perfume writing appears very similar to wine writing. Lots of under-and-over, start-and-finish, and 'tones'.
I'm not sure whether Grace (the younger woman) was deliberately colourless in contrast with Eva, or whether that was just the outcome of making Eva's story necessarily more colourful in order to make us as interested in its details as Grace was. However, both main female characters were appropriately sympathetic; the men were pretty much ciphers floating around them, creating or complicating the dramatic situations. Tessaro has what I consider to be a rather bad habit - she avoids her 'big drama' moments in favour of showing us the precipitating incident and then jumping to the outcome, either in her parallel narrative or chronologically later in the same narrative. While it makes the reader feel clever, because they have deduced the intermediate steps, it does also feel like a bit of an emotional cheat sometimes.
Still, a good fast read, well constructed, and reasonably well told. There were enough typos, etc., to make me wish, yet again, that these publishing houses would pay for some tighter editing. Surely there is no excuse for letting "free reign" get through... There were a dozen or so similar annoyances that threw me momentarily out of the story, and that's about a dozen too many.
I would read this author again.
