She hovers her hand over the doorbell, and then reads the plaque beneath it. But now, she thinks she looks like a poor maiden aunt, not the sort of person likely to indulge in perfect triangles of cucumber sandwiches or cream so rich it gave her a stomach-ache. She used to like the way it pulled in her waist, the pert sleeves that made her arms look slender. It is her finest outfit, greyed cotton that was once blue. She picks at a soup stain on the sleeve of her gown. She wears a small silk rosette on her chest, a Christmas gift from Albie, and she smooths its ragged edges. Once the cart has rounded the corner, she clears her throat and looks down at her dress. The straw-strewn lane is barely passable when a horse and cart trots by, and Iris almost has to crouch in a plant pot, a fern tickling her face.

Ferns and palms froth out of every orifice over window boxes, out of terracotta pots and planters, around the sides of hanging baskets. (Aug.The house is both shabbier and finer than Iris imagined tall, narrow and brick, with the look of a rake gone to seed. This debut is a blast it enticingly vacillates between a realistic depiction of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s London and lurid Victorian drama. Told against the backdrop of the Great Exposition at the Crystal Palace and its industrial wonders, MacNeal’s consistently enjoyable novel reads like an art history lecture co-delivered by Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens and read from a revisionist feminist script. Only Albie, a light-fingered street urchin befriended by Iris, is aware of how much danger she is in from the obsessed Silas. Louis turns out to be a generous mentor and Iris ends up falling for him. Unbeknownst to Iris, he stalks her with the intention of possessing her like an object At the same time, Iris also comes to the attention of Silas Reed, a taxidermist who sells stuffed animals to artists as props for their paintings. Dismissed for being a woman, Iris longs to be seen as a real painter, and when she meets Frost, he proposes a deal: if she poses for him, he will give her art lessons. In addition to William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, MacNeal creates a fictitious PRB member, Louis Frost, who meets Iris Whittle, the heroine, a painter of miniature faces at Mrs.

MacNeal’s lively debut finds a fresh way to dramatize the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of revolutionary, mid-19th-century British painters.

The doll factory book