Girl in Hyacinth Blue, Susan Vreeland
Review by: Ambrosia

The Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a wonderful novel about the impacts art can make in peoples' lives. The story follows an imaginary painting's history backward through time. It starts with an elderly man, Cornelius, whose father was a Nazi soldier during WWII and who stole a painting from a Jewish family that he sent to the trains. Cornelius is obsessed with the painting his father stole, convinced it is a Vermeer, yet unable to tell anyone of the painting for fear that it will be taken from him.

This book speaks of the way art, as trivial as it may seem, can change peoples' lives. To one little girl, the painting helps her to learn how to live in the moment; for a farm wife, it becomes an expression of hope; and for the sitter of the painting, it was a symbol of a life she could never have. The book supposedly talks about how the provenance of art is an ethical issue and the way art can stand in as a form of money, but the personal value of art seems to be the main theme of the book.

I highly recommend this book. It is not something I would normally read, I had to read it for a class, but it is a very insightful and moving book.

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