PICTURE PERFECT AUTUMN

An up-and-coming New York photographer seeks out a mentor who had his heyday decades before.

Twenty-eight-year-old Dani Campbell has it made as a photographer. With an agent who finds her ever-more-lucrative projects to work on, she's raking in the money, but she feels that something is missing from her art. When, in an antiques shop, she stumbles across an envelope of forgotten photos taken by a man named Lawrence Sinclair, she realizes that he has exactly what she's missing, even if she doesn't know what it is. And as the daughter of a couple who run a bar in Brooklyn, she doesn't take her position—or income—for granted. She decides to seek Lawrence out to help her discover what's missing in her art. When she tracks him down in Old Murphy Beach, Rhode Island, she finds a grumpy, bitter old man living in a ramshackle, dilapidated monster of a house. She convinces him to take her money for room and board—$800 dollars a week is what they settle on—and to mentor her. While she thinks he's poor, what she doesn’t know is that he's let everything fall down around him because of his bitterness at losing everything that mattered to him—his wife, Krista; his son, Elliott; and his grandson, Peter. She also doesn’t know that he's an extremely wealthy man from an extremely wealthy family. As the days pass and he helps her rediscover her eye, a number of events transpire: The nuns next door are losing their convent and must find a new location to run their arts school; Peter reappears after a long estrangement, struggling with his place in the family empire, and Dani becomes enmeshed in helping everyone as she seeks to rediscover her art. The book is well written, though some of the characterizations are a bit clichéd—the nuns are beatific, for instance, while Lawrence, though cantankerous, finds joy in helping the community rather than in his wealth.

An uplifting story that offers clear signposts about how it will unfold, bringing comfort and closure to the reader.