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3.84 AVERAGE
3.84 AVERAGE
emotional
informative
emotional
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This was a welcome change to my usual reading choices. It was quite different in style & I hadn’t ever heard of Egon Schiele, the artist, before this.
The story is broken into four sections, detailing the relationships & experiences of four significant women in Schiele’s life. It was a story of love, passion, scandal, tragedy & heartbreak. Egon was ahead of his time when it came to his outrageous artworks, deemed a pornographer, before finally being recognized as one of Austria’s most prestigious painters.
It was a well written & researched piece of historical fiction.
The story is broken into four sections, detailing the relationships & experiences of four significant women in Schiele’s life. It was a story of love, passion, scandal, tragedy & heartbreak. Egon was ahead of his time when it came to his outrageous artworks, deemed a pornographer, before finally being recognized as one of Austria’s most prestigious painters.
It was a well written & researched piece of historical fiction.
adventurous
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
i cried at the end :-( so sad
If you're in the mood for an immersive, lively historical fiction novel, this is for you! Traversing the years before and just after World War I, this story imagines the lives of some of the seminal women in Egon Schiele's life. Schiele was a seminal Austrian Expressionist artist, a follower of Gustav Klimt who constantly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to display as art. The four women that this story revolves around captured Schiele's imagination just as he captured theirs.
While the details of these women's lives are fuzzy, Haydock vibrantly colors in the lines that history has left behind. The short chapters and engaging, lively characters make this book one you can speed through—I found myself quickly turning pages as I rode the train to and from work. There is a fifth, contemporary perspective briefly used, and I think it could have been interesting to expand that woman's story just slightly. But honestly, I think this is a very well-balanced story that is bound to inspire and pull at your heartstrings. Schiele's work is magnificent, and I never knew his life was so fascinating (and unfortunately cut short too soon). The ending is absolutely heartbreaking, but the tears I shed speak to the life Haydock has injected into a story many never knew.
Thanks to the Overlook Press for my advanced digital copy.
If you're in the mood for an immersive, lively historical fiction novel, this is for you! Traversing the years before and just after World War I, this story imagines the lives of some of the seminal women in Egon Schiele's life. Schiele was a seminal Austrian Expressionist artist, a follower of Gustav Klimt who constantly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable to display as art. The four women that this story revolves around captured Schiele's imagination just as he captured theirs.
While the details of these women's lives are fuzzy, Haydock vibrantly colors in the lines that history has left behind. The short chapters and engaging, lively characters make this book one you can speed through—I found myself quickly turning pages as I rode the train to and from work. There is a fifth, contemporary perspective briefly used, and I think it could have been interesting to expand that woman's story just slightly. But honestly, I think this is a very well-balanced story that is bound to inspire and pull at your heartstrings. Schiele's work is magnificent, and I never knew his life was so fascinating (and unfortunately cut short too soon). The ending is absolutely heartbreaking, but the tears I shed speak to the life Haydock has injected into a story many never knew.
Thanks to the Overlook Press for my advanced digital copy.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, Mental illness, Terminal illness, Vomit, Death of parent, Pregnancy, War
1918 Influenza Pandemic featured at end.
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
In reading the synopsis of this novel, I was drawn to the place and time period – Vienna on the eve of World War I. I’ve been trying to pick up more work set in Vienna and for that, this story didn’t disappoint. I also love stories based on real people, especially those whose lives haven’t been well explored.
This book focused on the artist Egon Schiele and the four women that were considered his muses: his sister Gertrude, his early model and paramour Vally, his wife Edith, and his sister-in-law, Adele. Each section is given to one of the women’s points of view and explores her relationship with Egon, with a time-slip intermission between each section set in 1968 and featuring Adele as an elderly, impoverished women seeking forgiveness from her sister. This worked well for the first section, which was from Adele’s point of view. However, Gertrude took the stage right when I was interested in what, exactly, Adele had done and how her life had veered off from a privileged existence. I wanted to know more about Adele, not Gertrude. Then, just when I was invested in Gertrude, the author switched to Vally, and the process started all over again. I don’t know if the author tried to go back too far into each woman’s life or if the repetition of several scenes, shown through different points of view, robbed a lot of the work of tension, but I found it more and more difficult to be interested each time the narrator changed.
Perhaps it would have been better to have woven in a bit more fiction and just used one point of view? It’s difficult to say. I will say that I understand the desire to structure a novel this way. I’ve done it, with the intention of revealing the story more with each perspective, like peeling back layers of an onion. My main criticism was that the repetitive scenes leached tension from the story and the plot line felt disjointed with the jumping back and forth. That’s exactly how I felt reading this.
There’s a good story here, but it didn’t come through for me. All I got out of this read was snapshots of these women being mistreated by the artist. Granted, historic people are always subject to the author’s interpretation, and I doubt she meant to make Egon completely unsympathetic, but I feel like he did nothing but chase his own interests and in the process, made all of these women miserable (although I believe a few of them had their own instability issues). The final section from his point of view did nothing to change my mind about him.
This was a great story from a historic viewpoint, but could probably have been structured differently to make it more impactful.
2.75/5 stars
Thank you to NetGalley and ABRAMS Books for providing the ARC ebook. I’ve left my review honestly and voluntarily.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes