Intriguing and hard to put down. Ultimately the characters felt underdeveloped and the ending fell flat.

I liked the premise of the book: small town bright woman who becomes a con-artist art collector. However, I thought it became a little tedious. I kept waiting for something exciting to happen and it never did.

Maybe I let the buzz about this title go to my head, but I had very high expectations when I started this novel and it didn't live up to the hype for me. The premise of a local government employee embezzling money from her town and living a double life was really intriguing.

Becky's relationships with her father and her best friend, Ingrid, drew me in but they weren't enough to cause me to have positive feelings for Becky. She ended up seeming very one dimensional and I couldn't find anything redeemable in her character, so this book ended up being a really uncomfortable read for me. The glimpses into the art world were interesting and perhaps some more details about it, or just some more tension in the plot, would have made this a more enjoyable read. Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins for the digital ARC!

Becky Farwell starts as a hard-working teenager who manages her father's business and ends up in prison for leading double life as a con artist art collector. You want her to succeed despite her choices. It's an interesting story of how difficult life can be for bright young women with few choices but a driving need to be successful.

This was an interesting read. While I was never sure if I liked it disliked Becky, the main character, the writing was very well done and it kept me intrigued the whole time. I think Becky used her intelligence with math and accounting to embezzle money from her town comptroller job as a way of escape from her life and things that had taken place when she was younger and the choices she felt she had to make. She relished the high society life of the art world and she became very good in it. While she was embezzling millions of dollars, she did do a lot of food for the town and she did try to help out as much as she could. I feel like she just got sucked in to something that overtook her and controlled her life. Eventually our lies always catch up with us

Becky Farwell, small town government employee by day transforms herself into a jet-setting art collector utilizing some creative accounting techniques. The book is a whirlwind adventure as Becky tries to juggle her two vastly different lives. While a seemingly far fetched scenario, the book was an entertaining and quick read.

The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe is a very unusual story that revolves around a motherless daughter taking care her beloved father. She is trying to do it all in order to survive. financially. As this storyline progresses the daughter becomes addicted to collecting valuable art while at the same time working for town government. She is taking and returning money in order to make expensive art purchases. This is all done under the constant probabikty that she could have her schemes uncovered by legal authorities. This novel has many lessons to teach and, in my opinion, deals with the topic of addiction very well. I enjoyed The Talented Miss Farwell. At times, however, I did find the pace of the novel to be a bit slow. I would have liked to see a more character development of some of the minor characters. I would like to thank netgalley, Emily Gray Tedrowe, and HarperCollins Publisher for allowing me to read this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.

Maybe 3.5 stars. The premise was promising, and the beginning third interesting. It lagged a bit in the middle, and the ending was quickly wrapped up. I found the ending both perfect (in as much as we ever learned about the main character, Becky) and a bit depressing (the friendship between Becky and Ingrid). We never really get a true picture of Ms. Farwell's motivations as an art collector.

"Reba, as she’s known, is the picture of a wealthy art collector. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she’s a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make.

But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely—a quiet single woman known as Becky who still lives in her family’s farmhouse, wears sensible shoes, and works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller.

No one understands the ins and outs of Pierson’s accounts better than Becky; she’s the last one in the office every night, crunching the numbers. Somehow, her neighbors marvel, she always finds a way to get the struggling town just a little more money. What Pierson doesn’t see—and can never discover—is that much of that money is shifted into a separate account that she controls, “borrowed” funds used to finance her art habit. Though she quietly repays Pierson when she can, the business of art is cutthroat and unpredictable.

But as Reba Farwell’s deals get bigger and bigger, Becky Farwell’s debt to Pierson spirals out of control. How long can the talented Miss Farwell continue to pull off her double life?"

Thanks to NetGalley for the free ARC in exchange for my honest review.

“The Talented Miss Farwell” was a very clever and entertaining book. Becky Farwell was a complicated, interesting, even sympathetic character. Sociopath – not sure? But even as she was robbing the townspeople of their amenities, it was hard not to understand her drive and her need and her obsession and be in total awe of what she was able to accomplish. Of course it had to end at some point, but the ending felt somewhat anti-climactic. What happened to all the artwork? Did her completed collections get to stay together? It would have been nice to have a little blurb about that, but maybe that’s the point: that she didn’t know, either.

Money laundering, Fine Art, fashion, female friendship, small town life—can these possibly be related.? The Talented Miss Farwell encompasses all of these into an engaging read. Though in this day and age, some of it seems a bit unlikely, the storyline still seems doable. Some things come full circle which will be satisfying to many readers as these things help define the character at various times in her life. Having her best friend as the mother of a special needs child helped put a lot of things in perspective. A few days we’ll spent.

Becky Farwell was a smart, ingenious teenager who mom died when she was young. She helped turned her father's floundering farm equipment business around, and discovered a love of numbers and accounting. She turned this love into a job working in the finance department in her home town of Pierson, Illinois, quickly rising through the ranks. She also discovers a passion for art buying, and begins "borrowing" money from Pierson to pay for her purchases, always intending to pay the town back, with her next big art transaction. She lives a double life and is known as Rebea in prestigious art circles. The story moves along quickly, however, I never really felt anything for Becky and her double life. The final outcome was inevitable, and I was relieved when it finally happened. If you are interested in art and the buying and selling of the same, this story would fit the bill.

I was intrigued by the premise of this book, but unfortunately it just fell short for me. The main character was too aloof for me to root for her - and I certainly don't mind rooting for wayward protagonists! The art dialogue was snappy, the small town was true to life, the timeline was paced well. Plenty to love if you can get past Miss Farwell herself!

Taking place during the 1990's, main character, Becky Farwell, takes on a position of treasurer for a small town of Pierson, Illinois. Her day job turns into a way to "fund" her passion of art collecting and selling. While she plans to pay the money back right away, her obsession with art, and the lifestyle it brings, puts the town and Becky into greater and greater debt. How will she recover the money?
I found myself rooting for Becky even though what she was doing was greedy and illegal. Becky was smart, likable and hard working. Her friendship with Ingrid showed how she could be supportive of those she loved. I had little interest in the art aspect of the book, but the author kept those parts light and easy to read so I did not become bored with the names of artists, works, etc.
I would recommend this book (3.5 stars) to others who are interested in crime, art and/or strong female characters. Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Collins and Emily Grey Tedrow for the advanced e-copy of this book.

I was looking forward to reading The Talented Miss Farwell. I loved Katherine Neville's A Calculated Risk, another book about a savvy woman working the financial system. But this was a disappointment to me. It felt incredibly pretentious and condescending instead of sly and compelling. Becky Farwell was a disappointment. Instead of rooting her on because she was a woman doing something that people don't think women can do on her own, I was rooting for her to get caught. Maybe if she'd been stealing money from a Fortune 500 company instead of her town it might have been easier. Maybe if she'd been a nice person who was compulsive and undervalued it would have been easier. But instead the author gave us a character that didn't care about the people around her, using them or keeping them around to make herself feel good. She gave us a hypocrite who got angry at someone for double-crossing her and then turned around and did the same thing herself. And last but not least, she was willing to destroy her own community and let it fall into disrepair while occasionally pitching in with her own personal funds (that were a result of stealing from the community in the first place) to throw a bone to help out. I for one, couldn't wait for her to get caught.

Having worked in several small companies paying their bills and getting ready for audit, there was a HUGE suspension of disbelief I had to take here. Could Reba have gotten away with what she did in the 80s? Absolutely. But by the mid-90s, nope. And while I could believe the auditors weren't paying attention, this was a small town. There's no way the state didn't stick its nose in more.

So, what about the story beyond that? I loved the split character of Becky/Reba, and could easily see how Reba's love of art and ability to learn and manipulate artists and people grew over the years. More of that action would have been great - for example, when she's doing a huge deal, why not give us more of those details? Why not describe more of the art, so we can see what she's feeling so passionately about?

The most real part of this was Becky's persona and her relationship with Ingrid. The love/hate, Ingrid's ability to ignore or forgive Becky's worst aspects, all rang so true. This is clearly an unequal relationship in both their eyes, but which one holds the power is not as clear to them as it is to readers.

eARC provided by publisher.

The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe is about a woman whose obsession with art occurs by happenstance when she walks into a building to use the restroom not knowing it was the art building on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. She wanders around the museum- gallery and is immediately in awe of one of the pieces. The piece which will later be the first in her collection.

Throughout the book, Miss Farwell's character is developed with contradictory traits. She is a thief. She is a philanthropist. She is a buyer of art. She is a collector of art. She is a seller of art. She is caring. She is cold. At times you don't know whether to love her or hate her for what she does to the people in her community who see her as a local hero.

I recommend this title for public libraries.

"The Talented Miss Farwell" was just a so-so book about the double life of quiet, unassuming small-town Illinois city bookkeeper Becky Farwell and her secret life as brilliant, embezzling New York City art dealer Reba Farwell. I kept waiting for something exciting or even mildly interesting to happen with the plot, but the story was more of a cut-and-dry statement of facts than the "electrifying page-turner" it is being billed as.

The Talented Miss Farwell was a novel spanning over 20 years, in which Becky Farwell used her job as an accountant with the city of Pierson, Illinois to steal money from the city to fund her art obsession. She created an alter ego, “Reba”, a sophisticated art dealer that cultivated artists, gallery owners, and other dealers that she met in Chicago and New York City, to form a network to sell and acquire more art.

The story is told in a narrative style, with very little dialog or character development, just a dry monotonous recitation of facts. Even Becky’s embezzlement was told in a tedious description of accounting terms and the details of opening and closing various bank accounts to syphon the funds. The characters, including Becky, felt one dimensional and “sketched in.” Also, there were no descriptions of scenes, which further added to the feeling of being removed from the story. Moreover, in the scant dialog in the book, the author had the irritating habit of having the characters speak in incomplete sentences. In the end, this novel, which had an interesting premise failed to deliver because of the writing style, which seemed to prevent the reader from engaging with the characters.

Any novel that involves art intrigues me. So, I was naturally drawn to give The Talented Miss Farwell a read. The book cover was also a plus.
Miss Farwell lead a double life. In one, she is Becky the treasurer and controller of the small town of Pierson Ill. In her other life she is Reba, a world traveling art collector.
She finances her “activity” of collecting by “borrowing “ from the town’s treasury. For years her obsession with her activity grows as does her borrowing..
I continued to read this novel to find out if Becky would be found out or would she give up her double life..
This novel never quite captured my full interest. The characters were too one dimensional. They were just there on the page with little emotion to draw me in.
If you do like con stories you should give The Talented Miss Farwell a try.
Thank you to the author, Harper Collins and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this e-ARC.

I raced through this clever tale of a woman living two very different lives. It was fascinating to see the transformation into her alter ego and the details of what it took to keep juggling both personas. This book may cause you to take another look at that otherwise mousy colleague. There may be more to them than meets the eye. I may need to be a completist and go read this author's other books. Thank you to Book Club Girls and Netgalley for access to this early copy. All opinions are my own.