Blair's Reviews > The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby

I recently wrote a newsletter about what I look for in summer reading, and this is a perfect example of EXACTLY the sort of book I was thinking about. Final Act is soapy, fun and easy to read, but it is also extremely well-written and expertly plotted. It follows a ‘lost’, and later rediscovered, painting by the forgotten surrealist painter of the title. The work, ‘Self-Portrait as Sphinx’, is a sensation in the 1930s and later believed to have been destroyed by Juliette Willoughby’s estranged family. In 1991, a student thinks she’s found it, only to have her research derailed by a conspiracy that will span decades. It’s a juicy, absorbing story, Fake Like Me but with a bigger historical angle, and I ate it up.

Given the book’s title and its central focus, it’s perhaps odd that Juliette’s narrative is the weakest of the three. We start with journal entries and then jump into her perspective – I didn’t think this quite worked, the way we’re at a remove from Juliette’s actual experience and then suddenly not, for reasons of narrative convenience. On the other hand, I couldn’t get enough of Caroline and Patrick’s story. Their world feels so rich (perhaps demonstrating the strengths of Ellery Lloyd as a husband-and-wife writing team) and everything is drawn together with surprising poignancy in the book’s concluding chapters.