Of Flowers and Shadows

The story starts out in 1879 with a girl around thirteen whose name is Aurelia Sandborn. Or, at least, that's the name she currently has. She survived a shipwreck when she was a baby, and her mother died in that accident. As a result, she was found, her real name unknown, but taken into a family.

She ends up having to flee the place she is living in when an older guy tries to make advances towards her. She settles elsewhere, starting life over as a housemaid. In this existence she meets the painter Winslow Homer, and ends up becoming a model for one of his paintings.

There's a lot of detail about the kind of life she leads, and the hard work that she does. In the end, though, everything works out fine and she even locates the family she really belongs with.

This is another of the series that basically takes an established work of art and tries to develop a story to explain how that piece of artwork actually came into being.

It's an interesting book, although perhaps a little too contrived in its nature of events.

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