I wanted to like this book. The Monuments Men and the Nazi’s stealing of art in general is not much I’ve read about in my WW2 reading history. But the way the author laid the book out was so much work to read through, I completely lost interest by halfway thru.

The book takes the point of view of 4 different characters in, most often, 4 different timelines, which is bad enough. But what made it worse is that each chapter and character POV was typically a scene at a time - usually only a couple pages each. You barely got any part of the story under your belt and you were thrown into someone else’s story. Then when you did a round with a couple other characters in the next chapters and you had to try to remember where you were at with the one you’re once again on now. You just didn’t have enough time to invest yourself in any of the characters and I felt like I was starting over all the time. So. Much. Work. Plus doing this ended up with a lot of repetition on where their mindset was at or what they were feeling which was already talked about, but since it was typically a couple chapters since you saw them last, it had to be revisited which made the book unnecessarily long.

In addition, while interesting in its own right, the POVs and backstories of Cecilia and Leonardo da Vinci really didn’t add anything to the WW2 happenings with the portrait. They could have been their own separate section prior to the WW2 timeline and it would’ve been a lot easier and enjoyable to read. (Also, side note, I have absolutely no clue what the “Night Portrait” in the title is referring to….the portrait was not done at night, stolen at night, another portrait made at night….it’s like it was picked completely arbitrarily?)

Thanks to Netgalley for the copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.