The Personal Librarian

I hated this book. It’s a poorly written fictionalization of one of the most remarkable librarians, the woman who built the Morgan Library collections. All the book is interested in romanticizing her relationships with her father and JP Morgan and Berenson and justifying her mother’s decision to have the family pass as white. Meanwhile, Greene was mostly a self-taught expert in early printed books and manuscripts and art and there’s no focus on that. Her surviving letters make her sound witty and clever and these authors have just made her dull and flat. It’s an insult to Belle da Costa Greene. But one star for effort I guess