Book excerpt: When fifteen-year-old Victoria grudgingly accompanies her mother to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she has no idea her life is about to change forever. While there, she falls under the spell of the famous John Singer Sargent portrait The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Drawn into the portrait’s shadowy depths, Victoria finds herself transported back in time to the world of the four troubled Boit sisters. By the time she returns to her own world, Victoria understands that the sisters are in serious trouble and need her help. She dedicates herself to solving the mystery of their peculiar loneliness and isolation—only to discover that at the same time she is having an impact on the Boit sisters’ future, they are having an equally dramatic effect on her own. Spanning a brief period in the lives of John Singer Sargent and the Boit family, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit is a coming-of-age tale that explores both the murky world of Paris in 1882 and the upheaval going on in Victoria’s own time, the early sixties, all the while pondering possible answers to the questions raised by Sargent’s most enigmatic work of art.