Description
From School Library Journal It is 1862. In the raucous streets of Paris, 17-year-old Victorine and her friend Denise are standing in front of a store drawing pictures when a wealthy man approaches them to watch. He invites them to dine. Victorine is taken with this man, and he with her. They begin a love affair starting with small kisses and walks through the city until one day Victorine knows that she cannot continue to leave him each night to return home. They become lovers, and she leaves her work and her friend to become his model, for he is the artist Edouard Manet. Obviously intrigued by this young beauty, Manet draws her into this studio and his life. They make love, and she poses for him each day as he draws sketch after sketch until he is finally ready to bring that sensuality to the large canvas he has waiting. Victorine begins to see that she is more than what she thought she could be. The wild abandon that makes up the Paris streets in 1862 can appeal to the teenager who loves French, history, or art. Teens who know little about Manet or the context of his painting of nudes will want to explore more in order to place Victorine within a context and discover more about her life. VERDICT Mature teens for whom sexual description is not an embarrassment will find Victorine to be a young woman ahead of her time.—Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. "Wonderful… [Gibbon] takes readers on a mesmerizing, erotic journey not only to another time and place, but inside the mind of an artist… an insightful and riveting account." ― Publishers Weekly "You’ll be caught up in the rich and sensuous world that Gibbon’s weaves right from the beginning." ― Jennifer Davis and Claire Stern, InStyle "Very few writers, living or dead, can convey the progress, pains, and pleasures of the sensual life as fully, vividly, and unapologetically as Maureen Gibbon." ― Amy Grace Loyd, author of The Affairs of Others "Maureen Gibbon’s Paris Red is a novel to fill your senses: beautiful, brilliant, delicious, full of taste and sight and heart. It is a very Paris of a novel." ― Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Other Stories "Maureen Gibbon’s Victorine is a fearless working girl with sharp wits and calloused hands who ‘wants and wants’ and follows that wanting right out of one life and into another. You will feel her losses and her triumphs as though they were your own―and the next time you look at Manet’s Olympia she will look right back at you." ― Alyssa Harad, author of Coming to My Senses "No one evokes the raw, confusing desire of young women with crappy jobs, threadbare clothes, and a lusty eye better than Maureen Gibbon does, and with Paris Red she has distilled and bottled it: every sentence is fragrant with passion." ― Maud Newton, author of America’s Ancestry Craze " Paris Red is a rare treasure: a powerfully written novel with a sensual, fierce, intelligent heroine. Gibbon’s language is muscular and precise and gorgeous, and she evokes a Paris so viscerally real, I could taste the potato soup, smell the smoke and paint, and feel Victorine inhabiting her own skin as she discovers her powers. What an amazing book." ― Kate Christensen, author of Blue Plate Special and The Astral "In Paris Red , Maureen Gibbon brings to life a Paris charged with erotic immediacy and honesty. The novel illuminates the transformative nature of art and is engrossing with sensual details. Amazing." ― Cara Black, author of Murder Below Montparnasse --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Maureen Gibbon is the author of two previous novels, Thief and Swimming Sweet Arrow. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, Byliner, and elsewhere. She lives in northern Minnesota. --This text refers to the audioCD edition. Read more
Features & Highlights
- For readers of
- Girl with a Pearl Earring
- , a "beautiful, brilliant, delicious" (Elizabeth McCracken) novel about Edouard Manet’s muse.
- Paris, 1862. A young girl in a threadbare dress and green boots, hungry for experience, meets the mysterious and wealthy artist Édouard Manet. The encounter will change her—and the art world—forever.
- At seventeen, Victorine Meurent abandons her old life to become immersed in the Parisian society of dance halls and cafés, meeting writers and artists like Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens. As Manet’s model, Victorine explores a world of new possibilities and stirs the artist to push the boundaries of painting in his infamous portrait Olympia, which scandalizes even the most cosmopolitan city.
- Manet becomes himself because of Victorine. But who does she become, that figure on the divan?
- Intense, erotic, and beautifully wrought,
- Paris Red
- evokes the unconventional love story of a painter and his muse that changed the history of art.
