Delphine Duplessi is more than just another young, talented artist. She is gifted in another unique way. Her shadow portraits are not the normal portraits people are used to seeing and in fact it is with some trepidation that most people would employ her to do their portraits. She unveils hidden secrets, crimes and past sins which everyone may not want to even acknowledge let alone let others see them. She is not deliberately drawing people like this but that is her talent. She uncovers past desires, incidents and these portraits are highly valued, and highly feared.
It is with one such portrait which leads to the death of a person that leads her to leave New York and return to France to her family to recuperate and to also decide on what she is going to do next. Art is all she knows, this is her livelihood but she does know that it is a dangerous skill that could get a lot of people into trouble, the way it already has.
Her family the female side are witches of a kind. Each female imbued with particular abilities and strengths but all to be used for the good of people. It is 1925 and Paris is awash with believers in the occult and sciences who are all looking for answers for a France so badly effected by WWI. Delphine herself is desperately alone having never recovered from a love affair which she herself ended when she saw an image into the future and thought that her presence in his life would be eventually his destruction. She has never got over her love for Matthieu and coming back to France would she feel put him again into her orbit and whether she will be strong enough to walk away a second time is doubtful.
Told in descriptive detail so that a newcomer to the art of the occult would understand this is a magical story and one also of love and survival and family. A genre the magic that is, is one I am not very familiar with but it was a fascinating read which kept me literally spell bound throughout the book.
Sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review, courtesy of
Mystica, this is a most curious story. I don't remember reading about a character quite like Delphine Duplessi.
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