Synopsis
From the author of Family History and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion comes a spellbinding novel about art, fame, ambition, and family that explores a provocative question: Is it possible for a mother to be true to herself and true to her children at the same time?
Clara Brodeur has spent her entire adult life pulling herself away from her famous mother, the renowned and controversial photographer Ruth Dunne, whose towering reputation rests on the unsettling nude portraits she took of her young daughter from the ages of three to fourteen. The Clara Series, which graced the walls of museums around the world as well as the pages of New York City tabloids that labeled the work pornographic, cast a long and inescapable shadow over its subject. At eighteen, when Clara might have entered university and begun to shape an identity beyond her sensationalized, unsought role in the New York art world, she fled to the quiet obscurity of small-town Maine, where she married...
The New York Times - Erica Wagner
You could say…that the novel's central proposition is trite: how will Clara face the demons of her past? Yet all universal dilemmas—and this is certainly one—could be dismissed as trite. The truth is they face us all, and it is the novelist's job to breathe life into them one way or another, and this is something Shapiro does very well indeed. The strength of this novel is its particularity, its specificity, whether Shapiro is raking over the changes wrought by the years to the Upper West Side or describing Clara's sense of dislocation as she attempts to blend in with the other moms on the Maine island…