Chessman, Harriet Scott. Lydia Cassatt reading the morning paper, a novel.

Plume. 164p. c2001. 0-452-28350-2 $13.00. SA

This is a love story, in effect, between noted painter Mary Cassatt and her sister, Lydia. Against the background of 19th-century Paris. Chessman captures the careful balance of affection and tension between the two. Lydia, delicate now in 1878, fatally ill with Bright's disease, and May, robust. dancing her own dance with the more famous Edgar Degas, refusing outwardly to recognize the seriousness of Lydia's condition as she works to capture Lydia on her canvasses. The story is laid on the framework of four of the younger sister's paintings of Lydia: "Woman Reading" (1878). "The Cup of Tea" (1880). "Lydia Crocheting in the Garden" (1880), and "Woman and Child Driving" (1881). Despite herself, Cassatt captures the decline of her sister's health through her choice of postures, facial expressions and skin tones for her beloved model.

The background of the novel is richly painted with flashbacks to their childhood, Lydia's suitors and what might have been, as well as the tantalizing relationship between May and Degas. Lydia's yearning, in the face of death, for a husband and children is palpable, and her determination to spend her waning energies posing to help her sister, isolated among loved ones who will not recognize or discuss her imminent death, rises to the heroic. She looks at the woman in the paintings, wanting to be that person May has painted. "Remember me," she thinks, "Don't allow me to be forgotten." And through her own courage and the genius of her sister's brush strokes she will not.

Chessman, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, handles strong emotions with a delicate yet revealing hand, her prose painting a picture as revealing as the paintings, skillfully insinuating herself into the minds of characters, the spirit of the times and the breathing entity of Paris. A novel that vibrates with life. E.B. Boatner, Writer, Twin Cities, MN