Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a beautiful story about a painting, it's owners and what the painting meant to all of them. The story takes begins with the most current owner and takes you back all the way to why the painting was painted and about the girl who is in the painting. Different from everything I usually read, but I really enjoyed it. It is a quick read

The book is a series of 8 short stories about various families who have owned the same piece of art and the effect the painting has on each of them. It's a study on the effect that art has on one and how to put a price on it when it could determine your survival. It's very difficult to keep all the characters and short stories straight for discussion purposes. It's best to view it as an overall study on the effect that art can have rather than a study of various characters and family dynamics. The organization of the book made it interesting and enjoyable.

This is really more like a series of short stories than a novel. Just when you start to understand and follow a character, they disappear, never to be heard from again. Overall, I liked the idea of the book and proceeding backward in chronological order to trace the history of the painting was quite different.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland is the story of a painting. Suspected to be an undiscovered work by Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), the painting has a long, if uncelebrated, history. Through a series of vignettes, the reader is taken backward in time to the moment of its creation. These eight individual stories are like pictures themselves; frozen slices of the lives that have been enriched, destroyed or transformed by the painting.

In the style of Vermeer himself, Susan Vreeland uses the thinnest layers, laid one on top of the other, to achieve a depth of story that one rarely finds in much longer tales.