THE DAUGHTERS OF EDWARD DARLEY BOIT

A debut novel sees a teenage girl step inside a famous painting and confront the sexual predation that lies hidden beneath its composition.

Fourteen-year-old Victoria lives in Boston in 1963. Her only real friend, Pam, has recently moved away, and Victoria is feeling isolated. The situation is not helped by her overprotective mother or by Victoria’s having to wear a back brace to combat her scoliosis. Victoria’s life takes an unexpected turn one Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts. First, she meets Hillary, a girl her own age with three brothers and two sisters. Victoria and Hillary will become good friends, but only if Victoria comes through the second notable event of the day: being pulled into The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, an unsettling painting by John Singer Sargent. One moment, Victoria is staring at the painting, the next she finds herself in Paris in 1882. Sargent is working on his composition while its subjects, four young sisters, pose. Victoria discovers she can interact with the two youngest girls, Mary Louisa and Julia. If anyone else notices her, though, she is returned to 1963. Victoria makes several more trips into the painting, in part because she is an only child and Mary Louisa and Julia feel like adopted sisters, in part because she detects a disturbing sexual undercurrent to the girls’ lives. Sargent seems a kindly man. But what of Clifford Graham, the young photographer with whom the two older girls are enamored? Can Victoria uncover the truth and prevent an act whose ramifications stretch as far as 1963? Loyster writes in the third person, past tense, employing naturalistic dialogue and a simple but engaging prose style. Victoria is both likable and believable as a teenager of the early ’60s. Hillary and the Boit girls are similarly convincing, while the author’s adult characters ground the portrayal with quiet realism. The story itself moves along at a good pace. Loyster treats a delicate subject with care and, uncommonly for historical novels, allows neither fact nor fiction to dominate. Readers unfamiliar with Sargent’s painting will think the backdrop richly imaginative. Those who know the artist will find the plot skillfully woven around what can be pieced together of the historical record.

An absorbing, sensitive meld of fiction and history.