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Summary: PITCH PERFECT PROSE CELEBRATES FAMILY, LOVE, AND ART
Review: Art and life. Life and art. The lines pf demarcation aren't' visible in this richly imagined story of the relationship between Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt (1847 - 1926) and her older sister, Lydia, who sometimes served as Cassatt's model. Using five of the artist's paintings as springboards the author offers a moving story of courage and creativity, while she renders a fascinating study of the times in which the women lived.Although suffering painfully, from a terminal illness, Bright's disease, Lydia continues to model for her sister, relentlessly scanning each finished portrait as if it foretold her future. Chessman conceives of Lydia as a study in patience and resignation, imagining that painter Edgar Degas, who often visited the sittings, said to Lydia, "You show me how to live, if only I could do it as you do." In addition to exploring a unique sibling bond "Lydia Cassatt Reading The Morning Paper" suggests aspects of Cassatt's daring life, hints at a liaison with the dynamic Edgar Degas, and presents thumbnail sketches of her interaction with such artists as Renoir and Caillebotte. Lydia, we learn, died in 1882 while Cassatt lived to create for over thirty more years. Rather than a sad reflection on a too short life, Chessman, with pitch-perfect prose, has penned a celebration of family, love, and art. - Gail Cooke
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Summary: Love's Wishes
Review: As an artist, I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the processes of painting and posing for important Mary Cassatt portraits of her beloved sister, Lydia.
As a reader,I found this simple tale of a beautiful love between two sisters delightful, 162 pages of sheer fulfillment.
Imagine the brilliance of Harriet Scott Chessman in bringing you into the mind and heart of Lydia Cassatt, sharing her intimate thoughts about her sister, life, love, her illness and her feelings for Edgar Degas and his for her. Hear her speak of how life cheated her and blessed her. Travel with her as she comes to terms with the joys open to her, the service open to her, the love open to her.
If it isn't enough to gain this rare entrance into another's life, consider that you are in Paris and you are invited to share the wonders of a family who had Edgar Degas, Pierre-August Renoir, Louise and May Alcott in their lives. See what you learn about the Alcott family and Edgar Degas.
Most of all, just enjoy with Lydia a slice of her life and wish her well into the hereafter.
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Summary: Artists and Sisters
Review: Harriett Scott Chessman's prose moves with the deceptive beauty of a ballet dancer, its weightless grace diverting attention from the muscularity powering every gesture. Nothing is squandered, as this wisp-thin novel offers up more sharp-eyed observation and insight than books five times its girth. Consider the narrator's description of Edgar Degas, whom she likens to a dog. "He bit into subjects --- the foolishness of one artist or another, the insipidity of someone's latest effort, I can't remember --- all the while his eyes lit on things in our apartment, with an air of studying and maybe breaking them: the tea set, the Japanese vase on the mantel, me." LYDIA CASSATT READING THE MORNING PAPER is a fictionalized story based on the relationship between the American impressionist painter Mary Cassatt and her sister, Lydia, who narrates the story. The novel revolves around sessions in which Lydia poses for her sister. Lydia, 41, is dying of Bright's disease. On a good day, sitting and holding a newspaper while Mary paints her is physically exhausting. On a bad day, getting out of bed would be an impossible trick.
Mary, seven years her junior, is on the cusp of realizing her creative ambitions, having been accepted as the only woman in the inner circle of late 19th Century impressionists who were stirring up Paris and the art world. These sisters savor their time together because they deeply love each other and they know they'll soon be parted. Much goes unspoken. The younger sister avoids acknowledging that Lydia has little time left and the older woman doesn't force the conversation. They communicate through the work. "I was sick again this morning, and May (Lydia refers to her sister by this nickname throughout) looked discouraged as she helped me wash my face and get dressed. I wonder whether this will be May's last picture of me. I think May wonders this too, because there's a new quietness between us. She's intensely focused on her work, and she paints for a long time without a pause." The third and only other significant character in the book is Degas. In real life, Degas was Lydia's close friend and mentor. They may or may not have been lovers. In Chessman's novel, there is a romance, though it is only glimpsed through Lydia's observations. "He touched the nape of May's neck. He caressed her for a moment and she leaned into him." Such passages poignantly capture Mary's combination of tender joy for her sister, curiosity and yearning for a type of love that she knows is only in her past. The descriptions of Degas are among the best parts of this luminous book. Lydia knows well the famous painter's reputation for cruelty but experiences only kindness and respect from him. She regards him with affection, but is never completely at ease. "...this sensation of being protected from the Cyclops by the Cyclops itself, while he eats everyone else in sight --- well, it's fragile at best," Lydia says. The novel holds no suspense in its plot --- the reader knows the ending from the first page --- but it manages to continually surprise with its startlingly lovely language. There is little in the way of action --- a paintbrush flutters across a canvass, cider spills in the grass. The novel takes on big themes --- the love between sisters, artistic passion, even mortality --- but it does so one tiny, exquisite detail at a time. --- Reviewed by Karen Jenkins Holt
Rating: 
Summary: Lyrical Tale of Sisterly Love
Review: I was a huge fan of Tracy Chevalier's "Girl with a Pearl Earring", so I was most interested to read Harriet Chessman's novel about Mary Cassatt and her sister Lydia - the inspiration for many of her impressionist paintings. Chessman's style is elegant, and spare, and she limns a portrait as lovingly as Cassatt painted Lydia. If I have any criticism, it's that I wished the novel had a broader scope - it covers a very brief period when Cassatt and her family lived in Paris. I wanted to know more about the family before they came to Europe, and how at that time in history a woman was able to rise to such prominence in the epicenter of the birth of modern art. Chessman is an accomplished writer, and yet the book is not as deeply felt as it could be, perhaps because of its brevity. Still, it is a tale well worth the telling, and a pleasure to read.
Rating:
Summary: Lyrical Tale of Sisterly Love
Review: I was a huge fan of Tracy Chevalier's "Girl with a Pearl Earring", so I was most interested to read Harriet Chessman's novel about Mary Cassatt and her sister Lydia - the inspiration for many of her impressionist paintings. Chessman's style is elegant, and spare, and she limns a portrait as lovingly as Cassatt painted Lydia. If I have any criticism, it's that I wished the novel had a broader scope - it covers a very brief period when Cassatt and her family lived in Paris. I wanted to know more about the family before they came to Europe, and how at that time in history a woman was able to rise to such prominence in the epicenter of the birth of modern art. Chessman is an accomplished writer, and yet the book is not as deeply felt as it could be, perhaps because of its brevity. Still, it is a tale well worth the telling, and a pleasure to read.
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Summary: Only if you like Cassatt
Review: If you aren't one of the many who adore Mary Cassatt's paintings, this book won't interest you at all. If it did not include lovely reproductions of five Lydia paintings, and if it were entirely fictional-not based on careful research about the Cassatts, their friends, and the setting, it would not be much of a read. I found myself looking at the prints repeatedly; Chessman elucidates the paintings in ways that empower both Cassatt's artistry and the relationship between the sisters that the author develops. It is a slight book in length, and often reads like a creative writing exercise (research a historical figure and write a story in the first person based on your findings), but there are moving, human glimpses of a moment or two in time, and if the book leads more people to examine Cassatt with deeper appreciation of her art, then it has served its purpose.
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Summary: I'd rather be looking at the paintings
Review: In the tradition of Girl With the Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier and Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, Harriet Chessman Scott has fashioned a fictional account of how six of the artist Mary Cassatt's paintings were conceived and then painted. Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Papers also tells of the warm relationship between Mary and her ailing sister and model Lydia. Long an admirer of Mary Cassatt's works, I looked forward to reading this book but unfortunately I never found myself in the Cassatt world as I did with Vermeer's works when I read the books mentioned above. Lydia Cassatt, the older sister of Mary, is afflicted with Bright's disease a debilitating illness that ultimately leads to death. While Lydia suffers for weeks on end, when she is feeling good, Mary urges her to sit for her paintings. And as Mary paints, Lydia reflects on the artisty of her sister as well as her life filled with family and travels. Lydia also reflects on Mary's relationship with the artist Degas and her younger sisters creative passion for all things both artistic and spiritual. While reproductions of the actual paintings Lydia sat for are included, the book was never as intersting as imagining what the paintings were all about. This is a rather short novel which I'm afraid didn't shed enough light on Mary Cassatt or her sister. Finally, it didn't leave me with the feeling of doing moreresearch on these women as I did about Vermeer after reading the Chevlaier and Vreeland books.
Rating: 
Summary: Sweet and simple
Review: There is much that is admirable about the novella LYDIA CASSATT READING THE MORNING PAPER, and there is just as much that is annoying. Inescapably, this fictionalized biography of a valiant woman succumbing to a fatal illness has a subtext of pathos. Thus, hardly surprisingly, the story never quite is able to get past its own grim underlying reality. At the same time, though author Harriet Scott Chessman is a wonderful writer, the book is so short that it seems as if she is cheating her readers. There have been several works of fiction in the recent past offering possible background accounts of famous artists, or their subjects, or of the periods during which their most famous works were created. The two similar books about Vermeer, GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE and GIRL WITH PEARL EARRING, each are more fully formed than Lydia Cassatt's report is here. Maybe it is fair to say that this idea of writing a fiction around a well-regarded painting is an idea which has been worked, and worked successfully--and that it is past time for other authors to move along to new forms of inspiration. It is jarring to read thoughts being put into the mind of Lydia Cassatt when the author has no way of knowing what Lydia might have been thinking. This device completely breaks the natural flow of the story. Of course, this always is a risk when any author writes a fictionalized account of an episode in a real person's life. The detail of life in Paris, specifically the lives of rich expatriate Americans in that moment of Henry James and Edith Wharton, are vivid and fascinating. The exploration of the movement of Impressionist art at the very time when it still was being formed by artists then considered iconoclasts is the highlight of the book. Physically, it is not overstating to say that LYDIA CASSATT READING THE MORNING PAPER is a beautiful little gem of a novella, illustrated as it is with small reproductions of the paintings at issue.
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Summary: Artists and Sisters
Review: This is an extraordinarily moving and beautifully written novel. Chessman takes the reader somewhere new: to the inner life of a famous painter and her dying sister. We see Paris in the 1880s; we meet Degas and the Mary Cassatt; we relive the sudio sessions in which Lydia Cassatt sat as a model for her sister Mary. And beyond all that, we come to confront our own mortality as Lydia poses bravely for her sister, living on in paintings that capture the delicate ties between sisters, between women, among artists and their models. This is a book about life and death, art and love, beauty and transcience. I could not put it down once I started reading it, and I can't stop thinking about it now that I have finished. I recommend it to all.
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Summary: Lovely, well-written story based on actual paintings
Review: This novel is a recent example of the trend in using an artist's life or body of works to create work of fiction. Thanks to the author's imagination, talent and historical research, I was able to far better appreciate the paintings reading the book than I was in my art history classes 20 years ago.
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