The Brushstroke Legacy
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £8.49
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- £8.49
Publisher Description
A heart-stirring story about a woman's journey to self-discovery through art and her family's history.
Forbidden. Hidden. Denied. Can art be powerful enough to endure?
Ragni Clauson’s work, relationships, and body all seem to be falling apart. And she isn’t convinced that spending her vacation fixing up her great-grandmother’s cabin and supervising her rebellious teenage niece, Erika, will offer any much-needed rejuvenation.
As Ragni and Erika clean, they begin to uncover the secret paintings and life of Nilda, Ragni’s ancestor who lived in the cabin in the early 1900s. Ragni doesn’t know how much she has in common with her great-grandmother, but it becomes clear Nilda faced her own struggles. Taking care of home and menfolk, fighting off locusts, raising her daughter, and finding time to paint in the midst of it all were not easy tasks. Will Nilda’s passion for enduring art re-ignite Ragni’s artistic soul a century later?
Weaving together the stories of three generations of women, The Brushstroke Legacy stirs us to believe that no matter the circumstances, we are called to use our gifts—never knowing when they might bring a stranger to a new place of hope.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Snelling (Saturday Morning; The Healing Quilt), known for her inspirational romance novels, sets this story largely in North Dakota. Ragni, a single woman who is struggling with her job and her father's Alzheimer's disease, agrees against her will to fix up her great-grandmother's cabin. She's accompanied by her teenage niece, Erika, who has taken to wearing all black and rarely talks to Ragni anymore. Snelling takes this opportunity to weave together Ragni's story with the story of Nilda, her great-grandmother, who traveled out by train in the early 1900s to be a frontier housekeeper. Both women encounter hardships like the plague of grasshoppers that strips the crops in Nilda's time or Ragni's more humorous attempts to get Erika to adjust to life without modern conveniences. Both of them paint; when Ragni and Erika discover some of Nilda's paintings, they begin to feel close to her and are inspired to continue their own artistic pursuits. And both Ragni and Nilda enjoy romance with interesting men. The story has its sweet moments, but is largely tedious: the dialogue plods, the characters have little emotional depth, the historical details are sparse and the conclusions are not believable. And while the main character is a modern-day 30-something, the book is written in a style that will appeal most to older readers.
