Quattrocento

Rating:
Summary: A Timeless Love
Review: Quattrocento, the first novel by luthier James N. McKean, is a thoroughly engrossing love story about an art restorer who falls in love with the fifteenth century portrait of a beautiful woman. The story, which involves time travel to fifteenth century Italy, is filled with wonderful, accurate detail about art, and gorgeous descriptions of both past and present.
McKean is clearly very knowledgeable about art and art history, and the details he provides about art and the process of creating art lend a realistic quality to the story. The book is first and foremost, however, a love story. While there is plenty of poetic and descriptive prose, yet the book moves at a fast pace and has a lot of action and suspense.
Once I started reading this book I found I could not put it down, and finished it in two days. I recommend it to anyone who has a passion for art, romance, or who simply enjoys a good read.

Rating:
Summary: The Time Travel Label Is Too Cliché A Description
Review: This is an ambitious novel that is generally very strong in most areas, but falls far short when the author strays from what he knows very well. As a maker of violins the author, James N. McKean, clearly is an expert on music and music theory. He also appears to have an unusual level of expertise in paintings that date back as far as half a millennia. He uses this knowledge very effectively in the book, but when he moves in to science in the form of Quantum Mechanics he clearly has stepped away from his areas of expertise, and the difference is glaring. His novel is a clever turn on the idea of time, what is real, and whether our reality is the only valid one.

Classifying this as a, "Time Travel", tale is to do the work an injustice. This is not about some fantastic machine built in a garage, or some ancient artifact that transports a person when rubbed, dropped, or tossed against the wall. McKean tried to bring a new thoughtful approach to what we perceive and whether it is the only alternative open to us. He uses misconceptions of music as well as the ability that art has to deceive to start the reader on the concept of time and place being infinitely flexible. He uses a room called a studiolo to begin manipulating the perception of the reader, and right up until he attempts to explain that our protagonist actually has moved amongst a variety of times he does very well.

The angle of using a newly discovered Da'Vinci is a hook, but it could have been any noted painter of a chosen time, and the love story seems to have been obligatory as opposed to critical. His presentation of different places in time and moving amongst them is motivation enough to drive a tale and to engross a reader.

This is this author's first work and I do not mean to be too harsh in my judgment. Even though it only reaches the level of three stars, this author has a great deal of knowledge, and I hope he decides to write again.