Eight girls taking pictures, by Whitney Otto

This is a terrific book, skillfully weaving real events in the lives of several women photographers who lived and worked over the past 100+ years with fiction.  Pseudonyms are used for both the “girls,” and for many of the male characters.  It is telling that I often recognized what male artist was the model for the fictional character, but never guessed the identities of the women – nor knew who they were prior to reading the novel.  And that is an important part of the story and the message of the book – the difficulty for women artists to be taken seriously and more importantly, to be able to carve out time and space to practice their art, “a room of one’s own” as it were.  The key to figuring out who’s who is to look up who took the photographs that mark the beginning of each new story.  You’ll find some amazing photographs on line – and also recognize some of the women protagonists as the models in famous photos taken by their husbands/lovers/significant others who are better known to most of us.  By the end, many of the stories are interwoven in a satisfying way.  A worthy successor to her How to make and American quilt.  342 pp.