This audacious and impassioned novel celebrates overlooked women of art in history, entwining the lives of Ellie Waldon, a grief-stricken widow of our era who decides to sell her home after the death of her husband, and Suzanne Valadon, striving for recognition as a painter in 19th-century France. Threatened by unemployment following a careless snide remark about her exploitative boss, Ellie—“a resourceful, self-sufficient woman who knows how to get her job done”—turns to Kickstarter with a bold endeavor: establishing a museum of Unseen Art, even though she acknowledges “The only thing I know about art museums is that I like art.” A century earlier, Suzanne endures a harsh life of toil as a milliner, funeral wreath maker, acrobat, and model, before at last daring to become a painter herself.

Molnar (author of The Secret Life of Sunflowers) deftly blends fiction with history, conjuring the world and spirit of the real Suzanne Valadon, capturing the age, its ethos, and all that women faced when striving to create—and also, with pointed power, the drive to create work that endures. Observing the likes of Claude Monet, Pierre Renoir, and Berthe Morisot, Suzanne self-learns composition, color-mixing techniques, and perspectives. "I will be in a gallery, perhaps even exhibited at the Salon,” Suzanne says. “Maybe someday, I’ll be in a museum." Alternating settings and perspectives, Molnar illustrates a legacy of perseverance, as Ellie discovers that, in the past, Suzanne was as famous as Van Gogh—but history’s “tendency to forget women” has left her work in basements.

While the pacing occasionally is slow, Molnar has crafted an outraged yet rousing examination of women’s perennial struggle for recognition in a male-dominated society—Degas himself, Suzanne notes, “is convinced women can’t be artists.” This insightful, rich-in-detail novel pays welcome homage to women artists of all eras and the time-crossing power of art as Suzanne, in one urgent, illuminating moment, declares, "I want people to hear a whisper when they look at my art. We were here".

Takeaway: Rousing novel of visionary women a century apart entwined by the love of art

Comparable Titles: Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, Paula McLain's The Paris Wife.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A