Estelle: A Novel

For a few months in the 1870s, Edgar Degas stayed with family in New Orleans. His visit shook up family dynamics, and he left quite suddenly. In a parallel storyline almost one hundred years later, Anne Gauthier, an intern in a museum, has troubles of her own. Her boyfriend is mysterious — and not always in an alluring way — and her attempts to restore an old family home keep her brushing up against New Orleans housing politics and her own half-sister, who is eager to move into the house.

The two stories interweave in curious ways, touching and spinning apart in a plot that stands out from other historical fiction. The characters are engaging, and the mysteries Anne keeps stumbling across, whether related to her boyfriend or to family history, are engrossing and layered, keeping the reader guessing until the last page. At times the narration is clumsy or overstates the obvious, but those are rare moments in an otherwise masterful book. Whenever one of them jarred me from the plot, I soon found myself lost in it again, eagerly awaiting whatever would come next. This is a snippet of art history I had little knowledge of, and the author brought it to life beautifully.