Book Review for The Jeweler of Stolen Dreams by M.J. Rose

 The Jeweler of Stolen Dreams by M.J. Rose 

Genres: Historical Fiction

Publication February 7, 2023

Taken from Goodreads:  A captivating tale of two passionate women separated by decades but united by a shared vision. One, the famous jeweler Suzanne Belperron, fighting to protect her company and rescue the man she loves. The other, a young auctioneer whose exceptional gifts reveal a secret that endangers her very life.

“Only one thing saves you, and that is not losing sight of beauty.”

Paris, 1942. Suzanne Belperron is known as one of the most innovative jewelers of her time. Elsa Schiaparelli and the Duchess of Windsor are just two of her many illustrious clients. What no one knows is that Suzanne and her dear friend, American socialite Dixie Osgood, have been helping transport hundreds of Jewish families out of France since the war began. But now, the war has come to Suzanne’s front door—the Nazis have arrested her business partner and longtime lover, Bernard Herz.

New York, 1986. Violine Duplessi, an appraiser for a boutique auction house, is summoned to visit the home of Paul Osgood, a scholarly lawyer and political candidate who aspires to take over the Senate seat of his recently deceased father. Paul has inherited everything inside Osgood Manor, from the eighteenth-century furniture to the nineteenth-century Limoges china. But a vintage Louis Vuitton trunk is what calls to Violine, with the surprising but undeniable thrum of energy that can only be one thing: the gift passed down to her by La Lune, the sixteenth-century courtesan.

Since childhood, Violine has been able to read an object’s history and learn the secrets of its owners by merely touching it, but she silenced her psychometry when it destroyed her last relationship. Why has it returned now?

While inspecting the trunk, she senses it holds a hidden treasure and finds a hoard of precious jewels that provoke nightmarish visions and raise a multitude of questions. Who owned these pieces? Why were they hidden inside the trunk? Were they stolen? Could their discovery derail Paul’s campaign and their burgeoning attraction to each other?

So begins a search that takes Violine to Paris to work with the Midas Society, a covert international organization whose mission is to return lost and stolen antiques, jewels, and artwork to their original owners. There, Violine will discover both her and Paul’s surprising connections to the trunk—and to Suzanne Belperron, who silently and heroically hid an amazing truth in plain sight.

Told through Violine’s first-person account and Suzanne’s diary entries, The Jeweler of Stolen Dreams is a riveting story of magick, mystery, romance, and revenge. Inspired by the real-life legend Suzanne Belperron, it marks yet another masterpiece by New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author M.J. Rose.

 

My Thoughts:  There is no author that does it better then M.J. Rose.   The ability to take dual timelines and weave them together perfectly while keeping the storylines both moving forward at a perfect pace is a skill that M.J. Rose has perfected.  Both the 1986 storyline and the 1940’s storyline are written perfectly.   They each bring their time to life while showing how the past can shape the present.

 

Violine (what an amazing name) has a talent, a power, that has caused her nothing but problems in the past.   When she discovers a hidden stash in a trunk, that power tries to tell her the story of a time when the Nazi’s were taking over Europe and Suzanne, a renown jeweler, is doing all she can to help the Jews stay safe.  I really enjoyed how their storylines intertwined.  Each step towards discovering the truth of what was found in the trunk by Violine brought out more of Suzanne’s life during WWII. 

 

I devoured this book, I could not put it down, and now that I am done with it I continue to think about the story, the characters, and the time that Suzanne lived.

 

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Meet M.J. Rose (taken from her website):  M.J. Rose grew up in New York City mostly in the labyrinthine galleries of the Metropolitan Museum, the dark tunnels and lush gardens of Central Park and reading her mother's favorite books before she was allowed. She believes mystery and magic are all around us but we are too often too busy to notice...  Books that exaggerate mystery and magic draw attention to it and remind us to look for it and revel in it.

Rose is a New York Times, Wall St. Journal and USAToday bestseller as well as an international best seller. She has published more than nineteen novels and 3 books on marketing. She has been published in more than 30 countries and sold over 1.5 million books. The Fox TV show, Past Lives, was based on Rose’s novel, The Reincarnationist.

Rose is a founding member of International Thriller Writers, founder of the first marketing company for authors, AuthorBuzz, and the co-founder, with Liz Berry of 1001DarkNights.com.

In 1998, her first novel Lip Service was the first e-book and the first self-published novel chosen by the LiteraryGuild/Doubleday Book Club as well as the first e-book to go on to be published by a mainstream New York publishing house.

Rose has been profiled in Time magazine, Forbes, The New York Times, Business 2.0, Working Woman, Newsweek, and New York Magazine. She has appeared on The Today Show, Fox News, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, and features on her have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers in the U.S. and abroad, including USAToday, Stern, L'Official, Poets and Writers, and Publishers Weekly.

Rose graduated from Syracuse University and spent the '80s in advertising. She was the Creative Director of Rosenfeld Sirowitz and Lawson and she has a commercial in the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.