Instruct: Classify Amazon reviews into positive or negative sentiment
Query: Entertaining but no masterpiece

I read this book in two days. While it was appealing to me as a person interested in art and gave me a renewed appreciation of Vermeer, it has little more to offer than that. The writing is cut and dry and the characters are just generic, paper-doll types (the humble maid, her witch of a mistress, the more understanding elderly lady). Chevalier seems afraid to develop too much the character of Jan Vermeer lest her description strays too far from historical accuracy. This is a bland novel with an anticlimatic, yet realistic, ending.