Grace a.k.a. Julie has come a long way from Garland,Tennessee. Now living in a shabby rented room in Paris, she works for a less than scrupulous employer. She works in a grubby antique shop, Zanuso and Filles, restoring and mending things like teapots, resetting jewels in bracelets and necklaces. Barely making ends meet.
At night she watches the news from Garland waiting for the release of two prisoners, Riley and his best friend, Alls. They were sent to prison for a break-in at a historical museum in Garland that Grace planned and stole a painting from. She was never implicated. The story about what happens next, has many twists and turns, many surprises and holds your interest as you turn those pages faster and faster to the finale.
"Julie" works with Hannah, a 34 year old Polish gal that treats her like an unwanted little sister but in time Grace begins to tell her about Riley, Alls and the robbery. UNBECOMING is a mix of flashbacks and present day narration. It is the story of Grace and her life traveling back and forth from past to present.
Grace had no family bonds and fell in love with Riley Graham, son of Dr. and Mrs. Graham when she was in the fourth grade. She loved being with his family and she became the daughter Mrs. Graham never had. She secretly married Riley when she was eighteen. Grace seemed too needy, selfish and self- absorbed. Riley was easy-going, a bumbling kind of guy, who lived to paint buildings. When he sold his paintings, he blew his money on a "lemon" of a car, and wanted to do the art heist at the museum to impress Grace.
Rebecca Scherm weaves an intricately twisted tale filled with lies, lies, and more lies, betrayals, and lust. I did not like Grace. Grace was married to one man but in love with Alls, his best friend. Grace is a true chameleon who can change her behavior to please others and can re-invent herself too easily.
UNBECOMING is about so many things; growing up, first love, how to carve out a place for yourself, and how to gain control if you lose it. I liked Alls and the ending was a surprise to me. UNBECOMING was a very different book with characters I found hard to relate to, but the complicated plot was engaging.
A major debut novel of psychological suspense about a daring
art heist, a cat-and-mouse waiting game, and a small-town
girl\'s mesmerizing transformation
On the grubby outskirts of Paris, Grace restores
bric-a-brac, mends teapots, re-sets gems. She calls herself
Julie, says she's from California, and slips back to a
rented room at night. Regularly, furtively, she checks the
hometown paper on the Internet. Home is Garland, Tennessee,
and there, two young men have just been paroled. One, she
married; the other, she's in love with. Both were jailed for
a crime that Grace herself planned in exacting detail. The
heist went bad-but not before she was on a plane to Prague
with a stolen canvas rolled in her bag. And so, in Paris,
begins a cat-and-mouse waiting game as Grace's web of
deception and lies unravels-and she becomes another young
woman entirely.
Unbecoming is an intricately plotted and
psychologically nuanced heist novel that turns on suspense
and slippery identity. With echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and
Patricia Highsmith, Rebecca Scherm's mesmerizing debut is
sure to entrance fans of Gillian Flynn, Marisha Pessl, and
Donna Tartt.
No excerpt available.
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