🏷️ Topic Arts-Painting; Award Winners-Pulitzer Prize; Award Winners-Booklist Editors' Choice; Award Winners-ALA Notable/Best Books; Emotions-Grief; Interpersonal Relationships-Family; Social Issues-Crime;
🌟 Recommendation Details
The novel is a coming-of-age tale told in the first person. The protagonist, 13-year-old Theodore Decker, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum where his mother is killed. While staggering through the debris, he takes with him a small Dutch Golden Age painting called The Goldfinch. November Part One
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Theodore "Theo" Decker is a thirteen year old boy living in the United States. One normal day, he goes to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother to see one of her favorite paintings in the Dutch masterpieces section: The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius. In the museum, he's captivated by an old man walking around the museum with a little girl with red hair. Suddenly, a bomb explodes, killing many visitors, among one of which is his mother. In the rubble, the old man tells Theo to deliver a ring to an antiques shop, and tells Theo one last message, which causes him to steal The Goldfinch. Theo moves in with a friend from school, and follows through on the old man's final wishes by delivering the ring to James "Hobie" Hobart, where he learns that the old man's name was Welton "Welty" Blackwell. They ran the antiques shop together. He also sees the girl with red hair from the museum, and learns that her name is Pippa. She lived with Hobie and Welty after her mother (Welty's half-sister) passed away. Things seem to be going well until Theo's father finds a new girlfriend and takes them to Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, Theo meets Boris Pavlikovsky, the son of a Ukrainian emigrant. They form a bond over having absent parents, although Theo's dad dies after getting in a car accident while driving drunk. Due to this, Theo flees Las Vegas and returns to New York, where he is welcomed by Hobie and Pippa, who is on a break from boarding school in Switzerland. Eight years later, Theo has become a partner in Hobie's business, and has still concealed The Goldfinch to prevent himself getting accused for theft. He gets addicted to prescription medications and sells fake antiques to keep Hobie's business from going bankrupt. Boris returns, now extremely wealthy. He reveals that he stole The Goldfinch from Theo while in high school, and has used it as collateral in drug trades and thefts. He feels guilty and has made it his goal to gift the painting back to Theo. At Theo's engagement party, Boris and him fly to Amsterdam to retrieve the painting from dealers. However, not all things go to plan, such as Boris getting shot in the arm and the dealers escaping with the painting. Will they be able to retrieve the painting before it is used for more criminal activity? What feelings are Pippa hiding? What does The Goldfinch symbolize, anyways? I heavily recommend this book because it intertwines The Goldfinch with major plot details in the book. The painting symbolizes suffering and trials, but also the beauty in nature. The book itself also has many characters who struggle with their own issues, but things end up beautiful. This book spent over 30 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list and is a #1 New York Times Bestseller. It also won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2014.
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