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The Girl in the Painting by Renita Dโ€™Silva โ€“ 498 pages

Book Blurb:

Emmaโ€™s beloved grandmother, Margaret, is dying, and she has one last wish before she says goodbye. When she gives Emma a mysterious painting and the deeds to a house in India, Emma is shocked. Margaret has rarely spoken of a link to India before โ€“ she has been unwilling to ever speak of her past at all.ย But now Margaret has a request for her granddaughter:ย Find Archana.ย Margaret asks Emma to give Archana the painting and โ€“ most important of all โ€“ to tell her that she forgives her.ย With her grandmother on her deathbed, Emma travels deep into the heart of the Indian hills in search of answers, to a crumbling house overgrown with vines. And when she finds Archana, the secret Margaret has been keeping for over seventy years will finally be revealed โ€“ the story of a day spent painting by a stream full of water lilies, where a betrayal tore three lives apart foreverโ€ฆ

My Review: 4 stars

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The Girl in the Painting took me right to India in a dual timeline book, that takes place in the 1920s and the early 21st century. I was hooked from the start when an elderly English woman asks her granddaughter to take a painting and a message of forgiveness to her estate in India.

I learned quite a bit while reading this book. First, the English grandmother was once part of the esteemed Bloomsbury Set โ€“ a group of artists, authors and intellectuals that started in 1905. People such as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell were members of this group. It was there that she met a man and fell instantaneously in love. I also learned about a tradition called sati. Itโ€™s primitive and was honored in some villages in India. Sati ensures that a widow must be set on fire after her husband passes. Incredibly awful, right?

This book is ode to forgiveness and a song to sisterhood. Dโ€™Silva has a way of enveloping her characters with richness and authenticity. She can knit a story together that leaves the reader completely satisfied. I really enjoyed an earlier book of hers as well, The Forgotten Daughter. If you havenโ€™t read this author, I highly suggest you do.

Quotes I liked:

Truth has a way of making itself known, one way or another.”

โ€œPainting is conversing with your soul. Youโ€™re putting your feelings down through brushstrokes.โ€

โ€œShe smiles, her eyes bright beacons, her face a picture, a story unfolding, a gift.โ€

โ€œHistory both teaches and gives us warning. Through our history, we make sense of who we are.โ€

“She knows that once youโ€™ve shared something youโ€™ve created, you lose ownership, that everyone experiences it in their own unique way.

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