Laurel Davis Huber

Tells the story of Marjory Williams Bianco, the author of The Velveteen Rabbit and her daughter Pamela - who was an artist and considered a prodigy as a young girl. Unfortunately Pamela also suffered from mental illness and much of the book relates how her mother tries he manage her daughter's illness along with her marriage to a temperamental writer and her own career as a writer. The book alternates in points of view between the mother an daughter, and the author does well with the challenge of writing from Pamela's point of view, even when Pamela is going through her times of mental breakdown. The family is populated by artists and authors and the related pressure to succeed and find acclaim with one's talent. I think the author did a good job with the challenge of writing about these historical figures, but I never felt greatly connected to the people she was writing about.… (more)

This is a novel based on Margery Williams Banco, the author of The Velveteen Rabbit, and her daughter Pamela. By the time Pamela was 11 she had become an international sensation as an artist. At no time in her life did Pamela care if she was well known or if her paintings were shown in the best galleries, but her father did, and she wanted desperately to please him. A fragile child, as Pamela grew older it became clear she was mentally ill and often pushed too far by her overbearing father.

Huber writes exceptionally well about relationships, both in the family and outside of it. As the sister of person suffering with manic depression, I also think she has created a realistic character in Pamela in the way she thinks and behaves. I appreciate the authors endnotes in which she identifies those situations that are supported by research and those she created.… (more)

The Velveteen Rabbit is a well known and well beloved children's book by Margery Williams Bianco. That Margery's daughter, Pamela, was a child prodigy in art has been forgotten, but a new book by Laurel Davis Huber will soon correct this lapse of collective memory.

Huber's novel is compelling and affecting, the story of a girl who yearns for love. As in her mother's book, she seeks the love that will make her 'real'.

Margery and Pamela both speak in the novel, with chapters skipping back and forth in time in a paced revelation.

Pamela's father pushed her into the art world as a child genius; Margery tried to hold him back so Pamela would have a normal childhood, developing her talent organically. Pamela wanted to please her father. Her art was displayed when she was twelve; she was a sensation.

"This wonderful child," Gabriel D'Annunzio wrote after seeing a sketch she had done, aged eight, "whose name is like the name of a new flower. The drawings of a phenomenal girl artist are like flowers, delicate, fragile, wind-blown, sprung from the enchanted soil of fairy land."
When a girl she developed an attachment to Richard Hughes, a charismatic young poet who became close to the Bianco family. She created a fantasy that they would marry. When the much older Richard became engaged it caused a crisis for the emotionally fragile Pamela and resulted in hospitalization.

Over the next years her fixation on Hughes suffered many ups and downs until it became clear he had no intention of marrying Pamela. Hughes is known for his novel A High Wind in Jamaica.

While pursuing her art in New York City during the 1920s Pamela fell in with a young man and as a lark they married, resulting in a child, although they never lived together.

Pamela struggled with mental illness, causing great lapses in her artistic output. Late in life married and supported by her husband returned to art.

In the background is the story of Margery's sister and her disastrous marriage to Eugene O'Neil. Pamela encounters art world denizens including Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Whitney Vanderbilt.

Huber's meticulous research has resulted in historical fiction that has great emotional appeal.… (more)