Elisabeth Sheffield

This book is like a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box to help you along. In fact, it might be a puzzle for which the box is gone, and you don't even know if you have all the pieces, and the pieces are printed on both sides. It's not an easy book. But if you like a challenge, it's a book worth taking on.

Women in novels, and also readers of novels written by a woman, usually assume that men are the villains, that the central female character, especially if she is artistic, beautiful and show more from a disadvantaged background, must be the noble victim. This novel takes that expectation and turns it on its ear.

It is a mystery novel, and the reader has to reconstruct what has happened in this strange, exotic family, and figure out, as main character Stella puts it at one point, "who hurt who." While Stella herself is trying to figure it all out, from old letters and from talking to key players, the reader is always two steps behind her.

The Stella sections are present tense streams of consciousness. The book's strongest sections, however, are letters from Stella's aunt, Judith. Those sections are great, at times excrutiatingly emotional, in spite of the fact that they *seem* to be written in a more detached, less immediate and personal style. I connected more with the letters in their stiffness and formality than I did with the rushed breathiness of the present time sequences.

For those who are willing to work this book has rich rewards. There is a very unpretentious and ungauzy portrayal of an artist who comes off as brilliant and believable at the same time. There are lots of interesting motifs that pervade the book, affecting you on that almost subconscious level where you connect ideas as you read. The idea of the missing eye, for example, resurfaces throughout, linking with many parts of the book and anchoring the theme of absense, invisibility, and what is unseen but still there. Also the idea of inherent value, of copying, of replication, centered around the Winslow Homer that the main character is seeking and played out in her mother's art as well.

Once the book takes a hold of you, its grip is firm. I did not love the present tense sections, but I loved the contrast of the letters from Aunt Judith. I appreciated how complicated the puzzle really was, after all the mud had swirled away. (Aunt Judith likes to mix her metaphors too, she says) The underlying message, too, I think, is a treasure worth unburying. show less