The Witch of Painted Sorrows by M.J. Rose

He called it “our museum,” didn’t he? And for much of my life I thought it actually did belong to us, along with our mansion on Fifth Avenue and our summerhouse in Newport. I remember sitting atop my father’s shoulders that day, watching the groundbreaking ceremony and thinking the whole celebration was for me. Philippe Salome was on the board of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and helped found the American Museum of Natural History, whose cornerstone was laid on my fifth birthday. If I had a curious mind, I’d inherited it from him. Now if you can just temper your impulsiveness. A curious mind is the most important attribute any man or woman can possess. “Your questions,” my father always said to me, “will be your saving grace. Who took me from the light and into the darkness. Woman of moon dreams, of legends and of nightmares. And so this story-which began with me fleeing my home in order to escape my husband and might very well end tomorrow, in a duel, in the Bois de Boulogne at dawn-is as much hers as mine. Or perhaps I should say she forced her help on me. I did not cause the madness, the deaths, or the rest of the tragedies any more than I painted the paintings.

'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. In her instantly absorbing tour de force, Rose imagines Sandrine’s “wild night of the soul” dramatically underwritten by a tragic love story and a family curse that illuminates the fine line between explosive passion and complete ruination. Fear, desire, lust, and raw emotion ooze off the page,” says the Associated Press.

Rose has a talent for compelling writing, and this time she has outdone herself. Soon Sandrine’s husband tracks her down and an insidious spirit takes hold: La Lune, a witch and a legendary sixteenth-century courtesan who exposes Sandrine to a deadly darkness. There Sandrine meets Julien Duplessi, a mesmerizing architect who introduces her to the City of Lights-its art world, forbidden occult underground, nightclubs-and to her own untapped desires. New York socialite Sandrine Salome flees an abusive husband for her grandmother’s Paris mansion, despite warnings that the lavish family home is undergoing renovation and too dangerous to enter. Rose creates her most provocative spellbinder to date in this gothic novel set against the lavish backdrop of Belle Époque Paris.Ĭalled an “elegant tale of rare depth and beauty, as brilliantly crafted as it is wondrously told” by the Providence Journal, The Witch of Painted Sorrows “melds the normal and paranormal in the kind of seamless fashion reserved for such classic ghost stories as Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.”

The Witch of Painted Sorrows by M.J. Rose