Reviews: 'The Muse,' by Jessie Burton, and 'A Friend of Mr. Lincoln,' by Stephen Harrigan

"The Muse" asks a lot of its readers, in the best of ways. It asks us to pay close attention, given the unexpected paths that wander variously through time, race, global politics and art history. Odelle Bastien is a Caribbean immigrant in 1967 London, and a typist at an art gallery for the enigmatic Marjorie Quick, who insists on being called only Quick. Why? It's one of many mysteries that deepen when "Rufina and the Lion," perhaps a lost Spanish masterpiece, is brought to the gallery.

Then suddenly we're cast back to 1936, where rumblings of war are sweeping Spain. Olive Schloss is vacationing with her wealthy art collector family in a poor village, where she befriends Teresa Robles and her brother, Isaac, an idealistic revolutionary and so-so painter.

Obviously, all of these characters eventually will intersect, and, frankly, the prospect strains credulity at first. But Burton keeps her threads in line, weaving in some unexpected colors just when you think you've figured it out. Oddly, the characters remain somewhat at arm's length — perhaps because there's not an ordinary one in the bunch. That we care about them is mostly due to wondering how they relate to one another. It's the well crafted tale that draws you in, and in the end, respects you as a reader.

Jessie Burton will be in conversation with writer Sarah Stonich at 7 p.m. Aug. 9 at Barnes & Noble, Galleria, in Edina.

KIM ODE, staff writer

An estimated 16,000 books have been written about Abraham Lincoln, including volumes on his sex life and a recent fanciful novel about him as a slayer of vampires. This novel, deeply researched and elegantly written by distinguished Texas author Stephen Harrigan, who wrote a brilliant 2001 novel about the Alamo, is a worthy addition to the canon of Lincoln fiction.

"A Friend of Mr. Lincoln" fixes on the future president as a young climber on the Illinois prairie, at a time when he was trying to figure out who he was and what he was capable of doing. The "friend" of the title is youthful poet Cage Weatherby, one of the few characters invented by Harrigan to serve as prism and sounding board for the young Lincoln. Weatherby, who himself aspires to greatness, watches with growing admiration, occasional disappointment and not a little envy as his ungainly friend rises from frontier soldier to cunning litigator and crafty legislator, a man for whom personal integrity is paramount — even perhaps to a fault.

We glimpse Lincoln the great man only briefly, in the book's opening and at the very end. Instead, Harrigan's Lincoln is the "Strange Friend and Friendly Stranger" of Carl Sandburg's telling — painfully insecure yet growing in quiet confidence, bawdy yet surprisingly eloquent, lacking in social graces but clearly possessed of surpassing legal and political skills. Although this is a fictional Lincoln, Harrigan's careful scholarship and graceful prose guarantee insights into the real man that few biographies can deliver.

KEVIN DUCHSCHERE, metro team leader