From Page to Palette Book Club: Secret Life of Flowers by Marta Molnar

A Partnership between the Northville Art House and Northville District Library.

Do you love to read? Would you like to learn more about famous artists and art historical movements?

Join the Northville Art House and the Northville District Library at the Northville Art House for an art-inspired book club. Meeting bi-monthly, this book club will focus on fiction inspired by art history’s most famous (and infamous) figures. Participants will see the story come to life through presentations, and possibly art-making activities, inspired by each month’s selection.

The “From Page to Palette Book Club” will meet on a Wednesday in January, March, May, July, September, and November, with exceptions. Unless otherwise noted, all meetings will occur at the Northville Art House, across the street from the Library, from 6:30 – 7:30 pm. The next month’s book will be available for checkout by the date of each meeting. You must have a valid library card to check out a book.

Northville Art House Exhibition: TBD

January’s book selection: Secret Life of Flowers by Marta Molnar.

High-powered Los Angeles–based auctioneer Emsley Wilson has a lot on her plate. She spends her days arranging political auctions for celebrity donors, and after hours, she has a complicated personal life to manage. Her ex-boyfriend and business partner, Trey, dumped Emsley for a close friend of hers who also works for their auction house. But Emsley always makes time for her grandmother Violet, a legendary New York City artist, gallery owner, and socialite recovering from a stroke in a rehabilitation facility. When Violet sells her Greenwich Village brownstone, Emsley’s mother insists that she clean it out because “who knows what risqué pictures of Violet with her celebrity friends might be at the house.” Violet then presses an ancient diary into Emsley’s hands before she returns to the West Coast. On the plane, Emsley begins to read it and is instantly transported to 19th-century Amsterdam and the life of Johanna Bonger, van Gogh’s sister-in-law. Like Emsley, Johanna wants to chart her own path as an independent woman.

Emsley barely has time to read the diary before she has to confront Trey’s plot to dissolve their business, which transforms into a demand that she pay him $1 million within 30 days for his shares or walk away from everything she’s built. As Emsley struggles to save her business, she is drawn into Johanna’s family life and quest to establish van Gogh’s artistic legacy.