• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2019 November #1
  *Starred Review* Coulson's 25 years on staff at the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired this vivid, comedic, tender, and episodic debut about the unexpected forms life and consciousness take in that vast trove. The overture, "We," expresses the staff's commitment to the museum's collections and the reciprocal feelings of the art and objects for the people who tend to them. This establishes the novel's curious symbiosis and gives rise to some surprising narrators. An amorous museum guard, an anxious curator, and a "lamper" afraid of the dark all share their experiences, but so does a lavishly decorated chair constructed in 1749 for the Duchess of Parma, a 506-year-old marble statue of Adam intent on an heroic act, and a sketched figure hidden beneath the surface of a Tintoretto painting who emerges to flirt with and cajole discouraged staff. The ghost of a past benefactor wreaks havoc; one young assistant sent on a mission deep in the museum's tunnels walks through a portal into an alternative time and place, and another finds a secret masterpiece. Coulson is emotionally keen, acerbically witty, fleetly imaginative, and lyrically resonant, her love for the Met, for humanness, and for beauty radiant on each surprising page. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.

Christine Coulson began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1991 as a summer intern in the European Paintings Department. She returned in 1994 and, over the next 25 years, rose through the ranks of the Museum, working in the Development Office, the Director’s Office, and the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. In 2019 she left the Met to write full-time.