Girl Reading by Katie Ward

I have known about Katie Ward's first novel Girl Reading ever since it was published back in 2011, but somehow it took me this long to finally read it. I started reading Girl Reading very soon after Sailing to Sarantium and had some difficulties to adapt my reading mood accordingly, especially as Sailing to Sarantium left me in the middle of the story that will continue in the latter book of The Sarantine Mosaic duology. However, my difficulties had nothing to do with Ward's writing or the stories as such, only in that Girl Reading is a very different book from Sailing to Sarantium.

After I really got into the story, or rather stories, I started to enjoy the book very much. The timespan on Girl Reading is very ambitious from the 14th century to late 21st! But it works, it works very well.

The book consists of seven seemingly separate stories, but somewhere in every story there is a picture being made of a woman reading, whether it is a painting or a photograph. All the way until the last story I kept wondering why on earth is this book marketed as a novel, when it so clearly was a collection of short stories! Well, all I will say without spoiling the reading experience for anyone who have not read the book yet is that I was totally wrong. :) Girl Reading is most certainly a novel, but it is not until the last story that the reader will understand why! Very cleverly constructed book, I must say!

Ward's writing is beautiful. She has her own way of writing dialogue without separating it from the rest of the text with quotation or other punctuation marks which felt a bit odd in the beginning, but which I actually started to like a lot, when I got further into the book.

My favorite parts of Girl Reading were stories, or chapters, called Angelica Kauffmann. Portrait of a Lady, 1775 and Featherstone of Piccadilly. Carte de Visite, 1864. I was especially impressed in the way Ward in Featherstone of Piccadilly wrote the part (and skip the rest of this paragraph, if you don't want to know any details of the story), where a family brought their little girl to be photographed and only a couple of pages later we learn that the pictures were taken post-mortem. The parents had wanted some photographs as a memento of their dead child.

I've been so lucky with my reads this far this year that it's starting to feel a bit scary! But what can I do, Girl Reading was a very enjoyable read. I might even want to read it again at some point. Now that I know how the stories are connected it would be interesting to read them again.

Katie Ward has a website, if you want to read more about her and her writing.
Photo by Jo Rodger.