A unique novel; engaging characters and setting. I enjoyed this and would add to it a high school classroom library.

Thanks to Net Galley and Portman Press for the opportunity to read this book.
I actually read “August” first, and now, through Shade and Light, could fill in some of those missing pieces, adding to the richness of the story.
Reading these stories is a similar experience of putting on those virtual 3-D glasses and “being” in the experience, as opposed to being a bystander on the outside looking in on the characters and the places.
The vivid descriptions draw me in and hold me there, eager to turn pages to see where we go next. The title of this book could not be more perfect.
Thank you to Maryann D'Aginourt for sharing another incredible work of prose!

Maryann D’Agincourt, Shade and Light, Portmay Press, 2018

Thank you NetGalley and Portmay Press for sending me this uncorrected proof for review.

Maryann D’Agincourt has such a distinctive voice that reading her work is a full and engrossing experience. Shade and Light is an amalgam of complex characters and ideas; an intriguing story line, quietly realised; and a journey in which D’Agincourt’s even, informative prose is mixed beautifully with a passion for colour that is fluidly woven through the narrative. Colour is a more distinctive enhancement in the early part of the novel but lightens or darkens the narrative to its end, embellishing the main character’s recognition of herself as a person of shade and light.

Jenny Smila and Jonas Hoffman are neighbours, meeting briefly in 1968 when Jenny is fourteen and has newly moved from Hartford, Connecticut to Boston. While Jenny embraces her birth in America, her parents are linked immutably to Trieste, their European heritage, and experiences during the war, woven intricately through their lives and impacting on Jenny’s. The much older Eric Stram becomes enmeshed in Jenny’s life seemingly as a consequence of an untold story that binds their parents.

Subtlety permeates the secrets that are integral to the stories, interactions between characters, and their backgrounds. The desire to know more about Jenny’s parents’ obligation to the Strams, and their erratic responses to their financial position and their daughter’s emotional needs provides a background, rather than taking over the interactions between the characters. Jenny’s own behaviour suggests that there is more to be known - about her feelings, her personality, and her capacity for love; Jonas wants more information about his father, and his mother’s friend - and what is his capacity for love? Eric’s absences are secretive, Jenny believes she has found an explanation for some, but is she right? Irrespective of how engaging it may be to find a solution to these mysteries, none presents a raucous demand for answers. Rather, they are a nuanced part of the lives that D’Agincourt depicts.

Shade and Light introduces the characters, stories and mysteries that are continued in D’Agincourt’s later novel, August. However, Shade and Light is a fully realised narrative, with engaging characters and story lines that are truly engrossing. This novel is a delight to read, absorb and almost live in.

This is the “prequel” to ‘August’, the story of Jenny’s second marriage. It is also the stand alone story of her first marriage to Eric and the consequences of her unhappiness, doubt and self reckonings. The novel takes place in the fifties. Jenny is the American child (born, raised and educated) of a couple who came to America from Trieste, Italy, after the war. Eric, whom she ultimately marries, is the much older son of the couple who help save her parents. She is disturbed by the age differential and unconsciously by the fact that she does not know what he does for a living other than that he travels for work. Jonas is her next door neighbor. He is in college when she is in middle school and they have a casual friendship that, through the years evolves into more. The two novels are going to be sold as a set. Readers will have the advantage of reading them together and sequentially…and wondering what Jenny’s future will bring. They are well written and surprisingly fast reading. Thanks to Net Galley and Portman Press for an ARC for an honest review.

Received a copy of the book through netgalley,would also like to thank the publishers for this.
The title of the book is very appropriate,as the characters also move from light to dark,secrets untold but understood,duty and debt to be paid by the main character to Eric gor helping her parents.The after effects of war that effects the next generation moving from the dark to light.

I received an advanced digital copy of this book from Netgalley.com and the publisher. Thanks to both for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Ms. D'Agincourt has written a beautiful book that is full of descriptive prose that fills your head with imagery as you read it. Ultimately it is a story about family and love and loss.

4 out of 5 stars.

An interesting look at the lives of families affected by personal travails in Trieste during World War II, and the personality quirks and insecurities that carry back to those experiences. Jenny was born in the US after her parents immigrated, but Eric still carried the darkness within despite his years in America. Even Jonas, a several generation American, finds his life marred by the fact that his father died - of an illness before he was shipped overseas to fight in the war. The effects and aftereffects seem never ending.

That said, this novel was almost exclusively a series of mental gymnastics. I can understand better the term Art Fiction since I tackled it, but I found it very limiting and a read downer in places. Still, an interesting experience.

I received a free electronic copy of this historical novel from Netgalley, Maryann D'Agincourt, and Portmay Press LLC in exchange for an honest review. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me.

The echoes of the past resonate through the lives of two families living in Boston. The secrets of the past where one family was helped by the other in Trieste, are never revealed, yet the threads of it are woven through their lives. It is a slow and easy read, not much happening. The reader stays an outsider, much like the characters themselves.

Jonas sketches Jenny and the final product resembled his aunt Belinda, who was the only one telling him some of the history of the two families. Jonas spends a lot of time in a coffee shop, sketching people. He once saw a man, and imagined him to be Harold, his mother's lover. He was quite disillusioned to learn that Harold was not the man in the coffee shop.

Jonas was quite bewildered when he learned that the reality of marriage was not as dry and stilted as defined in his mother's old Webster.

Jenny set up a rigorous schedule to finish as much classes as possible, before getting married to the much older Eric.

I was not drawn into the story in the beginning, the narrator's voice was stronger than those of the characters. The characters never came to life for me, I could not resonate with one of them, but therein lies the strength of this novel. They stay in the shade.

There is very little dialogue and the personality of characters did not develop. I only later realized how clever it was, to portray Jonas as the observer of the world around him.

When Eric told Jenny about their parents in Trieste, it was in a cold, absent way. In fact, everything in this book happened in a cold, distant way as if one looks at the lives of the characters through a transparent curtain. They say in the shade, but for huge parts of the book, unfortunately so is the reader.

When you visit an art gallery or museum, how do you view the drawings and paintings? Do you view them with the mind of a reader and thinker, or through the eye of an artist? This book will help you see art and life through your mind and through your eyes.

Author Maryann D'Agincourt writes in the unique literary genre of Art Fiction. Shade and Light is the fifth work of fiction in her Art Fiction series. I had never heard of art fiction, so that is why I chose to read this book.

According to the book information, Art Fiction is a literary genre in which art is not solely an object, but is a reflection of what is human in all of us. A work of art precedes each story as a vivid portrayal of how art inspires literature. For this book, a drawing by Norman Rockwell guides us as we read the story of Jenny, Jonas, and Eric.

Each of the three main characters has a story that is somber and dark, more shadow than light. We meet Jenny, Jonas and Eric as young people and observe as their lives entwine as each looks for their purpose. The book is written in the third party omniscient point of view, which keeps us at a distance.

As readers, we see them as displays of artwork. We are told about them and as we “look” at them, it is up to us to see what we want or can. Plot is not the point of this book. There is no “big reveal” or answer. In art, “light and shadows” visually define objects. Before you can draw the light and shadows you see, you need to train your eyes to see like an artist. And you need to read this book like an artist.

For me, this was only a 3-star read, because I felt so distant and removed from the characters. However, the book is well-written and other readers might be able to better bridge the mind of the writer and the eye of the artist than I could.

(Note: This review appears online and in print at Mountain Times, Boone, NC).

Hede: Shadows reflect life in D'Agincourt's 'Shade and Light'

Because Maryann D’Agincourt does not write art fiction in black and white, her fifth offering of the form is the most aptly titled.

“Shade and Light” (Portmay Press) is a bewitchingly simple, modern novel filled with traditional complexities that entwine plot and character as an artist layers colors, crafting a final image to give pause, to make the viewer look deeper and question the depths of the portrait on display.

Gaze into “Shade and Light” and you will see how the personal effects of World War II bind and flow through two families — one so beholden to the other for rescue that the offspring becomes generational. The obligation of the parent is laid on the child.

Should it be? That is a question in one form or another that is central not only to this novel, but D’Agincourt’s oeuvre.

Here, Jenny lives in the darkness of her parents’ war experience in Trieste. Now, living outside of Boston, she is contemplating her young future when the much older Eric enters her life to raise the question of a daughter’s duty — first to family, or first to self?

There is after all a perceived obligation. The family's wartime debt can be paid by Jenny’s alliance with a man with whom she shares little, in contrast to the attraction she feels to her next-door neighbor, Jonas, and his haunting art.

“Her path in life was very clear. Did she love Eric out of a sense of duty? Whenever she asked herself this question, she understood it was unknowable. Her situation was complex and involved — any attempt to answer such a question would sound insincere and perhaps even false,” D’Agincourt narrates.

It is internal complexities that fuel “Shade and Light” — do not look for adventure here. D’Agincourt — whose unique prose is precise and efficient in that aromatic way that whiffs of translation — makes this point with a conversation between Jenny and her mother.

“American authors favor action; European authors write deep, complex novels, novels that touch the soul,” her mother admonishes.

“Shade and Light” embodies that complexity because, like life, it is textured. Yet, D’Agincourt tells us, it is through texture that clarity can be achieved.

This is the lesson Jonas learns after a lifetime of struggling to capture Jenny on canvas.

“Recently, he’d come across the sketch he had begun of Jenny that had turned out to be Belinda, his aunt. It struck him he’d done the drawing as if he’d been imagining Jenny in a stark light, not through shadow — that had been a mistake. … Surprisingly it had taken him years to realize.”

D’Agincourt condenses those years in “Shade and Light.” The lessons of a lifetime are offered in trade for a few hours spent gazing at the strokes of the novelist’s brush. The deal is a fair one.

Poignant prose and interesting, relatable characters; a tale of the past which infects the present and complicates the character's experience. D'Agincourt's story explores the frixion between duty and desire, family honour and individual struggle, through the art that binds the heroes' lives.