Girl Reading

This stunningly original, kaleidoscopic novel is an inspired celebration of women reading and the artists who have caught them in the act—“a vivid portrait of a timeless subject” ( Minneapolis Star Tribune ). A young orphan poses for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena. A servant girl in seventeenth-century Amsterdam snatches a moment away from her work to lose herself in tales of knights and battles. An eighteenth-century female painter completes a portrait of a deceased poetess for her lov