Christopher Moore continues to grow as an author, and now we benefit by getting sneaky little peeks into some of his most intimate loves. He confessed to his love for Shakespeare in Fool, and now I think he is not very subtly exposing his closet fantasies of being a great artist and painter in Sacre Bleu. 
 Sacre Bleu is an astonishingly rich journey into French Impressionism by a kinder, gentler, wiser, and thank you God even wittier Christopher Moore. This is not the humor of Bite Me or The Stupidest Angel, or even Island of the Sequined Love Nun (one of my personal favorites), this humor is much subtler, and even when it's not subtle, it is perfect in its context. And the context is a candy store of historical tidbits about 19th century French art, artists, their models, and their muses. 
 Moore has done nothing less than resurrect Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec into the 21st century. I remember reading Pierre La Mure's Moulin Rouge ;: A novel based on the life of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec as a teenager, and I fell in love with Lautrec and his prints & paintings. Moore has now re-ignited my love for the little man with the big paintbrush. In fact, if Moore has done nothing else, he has brought all these Impressionist artists and the Paris they lived and loved in to life again. 
 I remember when Moore went to France and to Paris to research this book, and he posted his wanderings and discoveries in his blog. Clearly he prowled the streets, and the underground caverns, and the bars and bakeries, as well as the galleries and libraries of Paris in order to reconstruct a time and a place that would nurture the likes of everyone from Renoir to Pissaro to Manet to Oscar Wilde. If you don't care about art, or painting, or France, or history, then maybe this isn't the book for you, except of course, it is Christopher Moore, which is just fun. And I don't think anyone who reads this will come away from it without a new-found desire to see the French catacombs, or search the world's art for the presence of the magical ultramarine blue. 
 A nifty moment of synchronicity for me was that I had just been reading Color: A Natural History of the Palette, when I realized I needed to get my son a present for his birthday in February. Since I wouldn't be able to finish Color in time (he is an artist), I decided to get him Sacre Bleu because I knew he loved Christopher Moore. Of course, I needed to read Moore's book before I gave it to my son, which I did, and in the author note at the end, Moore recommends Finlay's Color. So now, of course, I have to finish Color and send it with Sacre Bleu because clearly they go together... and that's the kind of magical thinking you find all through both these books.