Girl Reading by Katie Ward
There has been a lot of buzz surrounding GIRL READING by Katie Ward and I can understand why. The plot sounds both mesmerizing and intriguing.
Seven portraits. Seven artists. Seven girls and women reading.A young orphan poses nervously for a Renaissance maestro in medieval Siena. An artist’s 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 lover. A Victorian medium poses with a book in one of the first photographic studios. A girl suffering her first heartbreak witnesses intellectual and sexual awakening during the Great War. A young woman reading in a bar catches the eye of a young man who takes her picture. And in the not-so-distant future a woman navigates the rapidly developing cyber-reality that has radically altered the way people experience art and the way they live.
Each chapter of Katie Ward’s kaleidoscopic novel takes us into a perfectly imagined tale of how each portrait came to be, and as the connections accumulate, the narrative leads us into the present and beyond. In gorgeous prose Ward explores our points of connection, our relationship to art, the history of women, and the importance of reading. This dazzlingly inventive novel that surprises and satisfies announces the career of a brilliant new writer.
Oprah.com listed it as their Book-of-the-Week, saying:
The old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words gets trotted out pretty regularly, but we so infrequently stop to think what it means. In this luminously vulnerable debut novel, Katie Ward takes seven real images of women reading and imagines a story for each one. From a young girl struggling with an unintended pregnancy in 1333 to a performer photographed by her less flamboyant but much more talented sister in the Victorian era to an adolescent who’s fixated on a much older man during World War I, Ward’s characters are so utterly relatable that you’ll feel you know them after a few sentences. Yet none of them appears for more than a chapter, transforming each tale into snapshot of a woman’s life. At first, the brevity of interaction is disappointing, because getting to know the characters is such a pleasure. But as you go (and the pages in this book do turn quickly), Ward’s reason for creating these short portraits becomes clearer. The sketches she composes are an invitation to the “girl reading” (that’s you!) to go further on your own, to imagine the characters’ next chapters, or even their whole lives, to enjoy the infinite imaginative possibilities offered by a finite portrait. If you dig into the stories, you’ll get far more than a mere thousand words. In fact, you’ll discover, as one of Ward’s characters says, that “there is a world under” each and every one.
Other industry reviews are glowing, as well:
“A real wow of a first novel…incredibly clever.” –The Times (London)
Book of the Week: “Katie Ward’s assured debut is inspired by that mysterious and provocative subject of a thousand visual images: a woman reading . . . In each chapter Ward twists a story around real works of art. Her seven unpredictable tales serve up a lively, irreverent and even feminist journey through history.�
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