In this coming-of-age story of Bianca (Bea) Paradiso, an art student in wartime and post-war Detroit, Leithauser succeeds in vividly evoking a world gone by. The characters -- Bea's immediate and extended family, her fellow art students, the soldiers she encounters when she spends time in the local hospital sketching portraits to cheer up the troops -- feel precisely right. But the book is more than just a snapshot of a moment; the characters grow and change over the course of the novel, none more so than Bea herself, whom Leithauser shows us negotiating the passage from a blue-collar background to post-war prosperity.

I found the last third of the book, the treatment of Bea's marriage, less compelling than the initial section. But this is a terrific novel from a gifted stylist -- well worth reading.