Aimee Pokwatka's Self-Portrait with Nothing
This book has a really cool concept, but I’m not sure that was enough? So it’s the story of a woman, an academic forensic anthropologist, who has known since she was a teen that her biological mother was famous artist Ula Frost, whose portraits supposedly show versions of their subjects from alternate worlds. And now she’s vanished, and creepy art collectors and lawyers and journalists are coming for the anthropologist, who goes to Europe to see what she can find out, and maybe meet the woman she feels abandoned by (sidebar: Ula was a pregnant teen who left her baby with the local lesbian veterinarian couple, who are amazing). That’s all well and good, but the whole story is from the anthropologist's POV, and she’s kind of whiny and passive? And there’s a lot of manufactured conflict with her husband? Things get more action-packed in the second half and the end was legitimately interesting, but the frustrating protagonist bogs things down a lot. B/B+.
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A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in October.
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