MARCH 2017 - AudioFile
Polly Stone’s first great choice in performing this lovely audiobook is to not attempt a Downeast accent for Christina Olsen, which would have made her humanity less universal, and which no one gets right anyway. Christina is the model for the woman in the field in Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting CHRISTINA’S WORLD. In telling a story of her, Kline runs a huge risk because it’s the wondering who Christina is and what she is feeling that gives the picture its power. Making her specific might have destroyed our connection to her, but, instead, amazingly, Kline paints a Christina just as evocative and memorable as Wyeth’s. Stone does the best possible thing in her performance; she becomes invisible, letting this remarkably imagined Christina live and shine. B.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
12/19/2016
The world of the woman immortalized in Andrew Wyeth’s haunting painting Christina’s World is imagined in Kline’s (Orphan Train) intriguing novel. The artist meets Christina Olson in 1939 when he summers near her home in Cushing, Maine, introduced by Betsy James, the young woman who knew the Olsons and would become Wyeth’s wife. The story is told from Christina’s point of view, from the moment she reflects on the painting; it then goes back and forth through her history, from her childhood through the time that Wyeth painted at her family farm, using its environs and Christina and her brother as subjects. First encountering Christina as a middle-aged woman, Wyeth saw something in her that others did not. Their shared bond of physical infirmity (she had undiagnosed polio; he had a damaged right foot and bad hip) enables her to open up about her family and her difficult life, primarily as a shut-in, caring for her family, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and doing laundry—all without electricity and despite her debilitating disease. Hope of escape, when her teacher offers her the chance to take her place, was summarily quashed by her father. Her first and only romance with a summer visitor from Boston has an ignoble end when he marries someone in his social class. Through it all, the author’s insightful, evocative prose brings Christina’s singular perspective and indomitable spirit to life. (Feb.)
Library Reads
Fantastic and touching.
Booklist
Readers will savor the quotidian details that compose Christina’s ‘quiet country life.’ Orphan Train was a best-seller and popular book-discussion choice, so expect demand.”-
Erik Larson
A brilliantly imagined fictional memoir of the woman in the famed Wyeth painting ‘Christina’s World,’ so detailed, moving, and utterly transportive that I’ll never be able to look at the painting again without thinking of this book and the characters who populate its pages.
Lily King
The inscrutable figure in the foreground of Wyeth’s Christina’s World is our American Mona Lisa, and Christina Baker Kline has pulled back the veil to imagine her rich story. Tender [and] tragic.
Michael Chabon
A graceful, moving and powerful demonstration of what can happen when a fearless literary imagination combines with an inexhaustible curiosity about the past and the human heart.
Nathan Hill
With remarkable precision and compassion, A PIECE OF THE WORLD transports us to a mid-century farmhouse on the coast of Maine. But just like the painting that inspired it, this gorgeous novel is about so much more. Heartbreaking and life-affirming.
Cosmopolitan
Epic.
First for Women
Skillfully interweaving fact and fiction, Kline creates a starkly lovely, intricately layered portrait...By turns profoundly sad and deeply hopeful.
O: the Oprah Magazine
Who has not gazed on Wyeth’s picture and wondered, why does that girl have so very far to go?... A pure, powerful story of suffering met with a fight. In fiction, in her quiet way, Christina triumphs—and so does this novel.
Real Simple
A gorgeous read.
Providence Journal
Baker Kline clearly has done her research on the Olson family, but it is her empathy and imagination that make this book sing....Like the woman in the Wyeth painting, the Christina Olson of this novel is unbowed, confounding, and ultimately inspiring.”
BookPage
Superb...The beauty of Kline’s writing and her grasp of her characters is such that at first you want to sink into this book like a warm bath....Gentle and profound, A Piece of the World shows the healing power of simple, unexpected friendship.
San Diego Union-Tribune
A novel about not just art, but family and home — things that last, and what it takes for them to do so.
Historical Novel Society
With delicate palette, stark images, subtle tones, nuanced brushstrokes, and consummate craftsmanship, Christina Baker Kline has written this novel the way Andrew Wyeth painted the canvas. It is a masterpiece.
Sydney Morning Herald
Kline’s portrait of her main character is moving in an unsentimental way as she evokes the New England landscape, the torment of crippling disease, and the piece of history embodied in Olson’s story.
Kristin Hannah
Christina Baker Kline’s remarkable novel, A PIECE OF THE WORLD, is the perfect book club pick. An evocative, beautifully written, exquisitely researched historical novel that will both teach and enthrall the reader. A must read for anyone who love history and art.
Daily Beast
With beautiful and stunning prose, the novel explores the sensitive and complex bond between artist and muse against the beauty of the rural American landscape.
Portland Press Herald
Absorbing...A portrait of Maine farm life, of an iron-willed spinster with polio and the accidental friendship that changes everything...Kline has a graceful, arresting style that lifts the narrative, and her portrayal of Andy leavens the entire story.
Marie Claire
Artfully (pun intended) inspired by the Andrew Wyeth painting Christina’s World.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Like Wyeth’s paintings, this is a vivid novel about hardscrabble lives and prairie grit and the seemingly small but significant beauties found there.
Christian Science Monitor
Kline herself is an artist, drawing on the real history of Christina Olson and Andrew Wyeth to conjure up her own haunting portrait.... Kline’s deep research into characters, place, and time period provides the outlines of a compelling story, which she then expertly brings into three dimensions.
Portland Tribune (Oregon)
The novel provides gorgeous, complicated answers to all the questions the painting stirs, beginning with the day a young painter appears on her porch. Kline has created a memorable and unforgettable voice for Anna Christina Olson, the girl in the field.
USA Today
Fans of Kline’s phenomenal 2013 best seller Orphan Train will recognize the way the new novel...brings to vivid life a little-known corner of history...Avoiding sentimental uplift, A Piece of the World offers unsparing insight into the real woman behind the painting.
People
Another winner from the author of Orphan Train. In this beautifully observed fictional memoir, Kline uses Andrew Wyeths’ iconic painting Christina’s World as the taking-off point for a moving portrait of the artist’s real-life muse. Book of the week.
New York Times Book Review
The novel evokes the somber grace of [Wyeth’s] paintings … Christina’s yearning, her determination, her will to dream, occupy the emotional center in both the novel and the painting. A Piece of the World is a story for those who want the mysterious made real.
the Oprah Magazine O
Who has not gazed on Wyeth’s picture and wondered, why does that girl have so very far to go?... A pure, powerful story of suffering met with a fight. In fiction, in her quiet way, Christina triumphs--and so does this novel.
Portland Tribune (Oregan)
The novel provides gorgeous, complicated answers to all the questions the painting stirs, beginning with the day a young painter appears on her porch. Kline has created a memorable and unforgettable voice for Anna Christina Olson, the girl in the field.
Library Journal
09/15/2016
Andrew Wyeth's celebrated Christina's World features neighbor Christina Olson sitting in a field, her damaged legs stretched out behind her as she gazes across dry-brush fields toward a distant farmhouse. Kline, whose Orphan Train spent more than two years on the New York Times best sellers list, here expands on the painting to imagine Christina's life. With a 350,000-copy first printing.
MARCH 2017 - AudioFile
Polly Stone’s first great choice in performing this lovely audiobook is to not attempt a Downeast accent for Christina Olsen, which would have made her humanity less universal, and which no one gets right anyway. Christina is the model for the woman in the field in Andrew Wyeth’s famous painting CHRISTINA’S WORLD. In telling a story of her, Kline runs a huge risk because it’s the wondering who Christina is and what she is feeling that gives the picture its power. Making her specific might have destroyed our connection to her, but, instead, amazingly, Kline paints a Christina just as evocative and memorable as Wyeth’s. Stone does the best possible thing in her performance; she becomes invisible, letting this remarkably imagined Christina live and shine. B.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2016-12-07
The real-life subject of an iconic work of art is given her own version of a canvas—space in which to reveal her tough personality, bruised heart, and "artist's soul." The figure at the center of Andrew Wyeth's celebrated painting Christina's World has her back to the viewer, but Kline (Orphan Train, 2013, etc.) turns her to face the reader, simultaneously equipping her with a back story and a lyrical voice. Meet Christina Olson, "a middle-aged spinster" who narrates her life in segments, dodging back and forth between her origins and childhood and her adult life, all of this material rooted in the large Maine house built by her family, whose early members, relatives of Nathaniel Hawthorne, fled Salem in 1743. Born in 1893, Christina is a clever schoolgirl whose opportunity to train as a teacher will be obstructed by her parents, who need her to work at home. The progressive bone disease which makes mobility difficult and brings constant pain scarcely reduces her ceaseless domestic workload. At age 20 she has one tantalizing chance at love, but after that Christina's horizons shrink until the day in 1939 when a friend introduces her to 22-year-old Andrew Wyeth. Christina, now 46, discovers a kindred spirit and Wyeth, a kind of muse whom he will paint several times. Kline lovingly evokes the restricted life of a sensitive woman forced to renounce the norms of intimacy and self-advancement while using her as a lens to capture the simple beauty of the American farming landscape: "The flat nails that secure the weather clapboards, the drip of water from the rusty cistern, cold blue light through a cracked window." It's thin on plot, but Kline's reading group-friendly novel delivers a character portrait that is painterly, sensuous, and sympathetic.
