Girl Braiding Her Hair

April 1, 2024
This audacious and impassioned novel celebrates overlooked women of art in history, entwining the lives of Ellie Waldon, a grief-stricken widow of our era who decides to sell her home after the death of her husband, and Suzanne Valadon, striving for recognition as a painter in 19th-century France. Threatened by unemployment following a careless snide remark about her exploitative boss, Ellie—“a resourceful, self-sufficient woman who knows how to get her job done”—turns to Kickstarter with a bold endeavor: establishing a museum of Unseen Art, even though she acknowledges “The only thing I know about art museums is that I like art.” A century earlier, Suzanne endures a harsh life of toil as a milliner, funeral wreath maker, acrobat, and model, before at last daring to become a painter herself.
Molnar (author of The Secret Life of Sunflowers) deftly blends fiction with history, conjuring the world and spirit of the real Suzanne Valadon, capturing the age, its ethos, and all that women faced when striving to create—and also, with pointed power, the drive to create work that endures. Observing the likes of Claude Monet, Pierre Renoir, and Berthe Morisot, Suzanne self-learns composition, color-mixing techniques, and perspectives. "I will be in a gallery, perhaps even exhibited at the Salon,” Suzanne says. “Maybe someday, I’ll be in a museum." Alternating settings and perspectives, Molnar illustrates a legacy of perseverance, as Ellie discovers that, in the past, Suzanne was as famous as Van Gogh—but history’s “tendency to forget women” has left her work in basements.
While the pacing occasionally is slow, Molnar has crafted an outraged yet rousing examination of women’s perennial struggle for recognition in a male-dominated society—Degas himself, Suzanne notes, “is convinced women can’t be artists.” This insightful, rich-in-detail novel pays welcome homage to women artists of all eras and the time-crossing power of art as Suzanne, in one urgent, illuminating moment, declares, "I want people to hear a whisper when they look at my art. We were here".
Takeaway: Rousing novel of visionary women a century apart entwined by the love of art
Comparable Titles: Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, Paula McLain's The Paris Wife.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A

June 15, 2024
Two women's artistic ambitions converge across continents and centuries in this novel. In present-day Philadelphia, Ellie Waldon has not been able to pull herself out of a slump after her husband's death from cancer. The discovery that her boss has been passing off her work as his own is the last straw, and she quits her job. But before she storms out, her work as a brand manager introduces her to the oeuvre of pioneering 19th-century artist Suzanne Valadon. The narrative then pivots to Suzanne's tumultuous life in Paris. Raised by an alcoholic single mother, Suzanne is expelled from convent school at 11 years old and hurtles between various jobs, always dreaming of becoming an artist. Molnar's book proceeds to alternate between Ellie's and Suzanne's storylines. Ellie learns that most museums display only 2% to 4% of their art at a given time. With Suzanne as her inspiration, Ellie decides to found the Museum of Unseen Art to "display art that nobody sees because it's stashed away in basements in musty drawers." Ellie's efforts to change her life are challenged by her older sister's skepticism and the specter of the home she lived in with her husband, which she was forced to sell. In Paris, Suzanne eventually becomes an artist's model, which gives her the opportunity to study painters and sculptors at work. She begins to understand "form, the way it's born of light," and uses her earnings to buy art supplies. Readers follow Suzanne's encounters with famous artists of the time, including Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, and Degas, as she grasps at financial stability, creative satisfaction, and respectability. Fans of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle (2021) will find much to enjoy in this meticulously researched novel's braided narratives. Suzanne's storyline is particularly enthralling, with its glamorous locations and references to historical figures and events. Ellie's story suffers slightly by comparison, not only because Philadelphia is no Paris, but because Ellie's plot is somewhat overstuffed with dialogue, unnecessary plot twists, and too many characters. Although Molnar has a gift for quick character studies (at one point, she describes Ellie's unctuous former boss as looking "like a meerkat on guard duty"), the book's modern-day sections would have benefited from a slower pace and deeper character development. A pair of resilient heroes memorably explores creativity across the ages in this vibrant tale.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.