"There is a heartbreaking simplicity to Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper. Yet like Cassatt’s art, its odd angles and delicate, inevitable details make themselves felt long after one has finished this fine period piece." —Newsday

"Chessman’s novel embraces the quiet dramas of domestic life with a deceptively light touch, never sentimental, with a vigorous core at the center that just happens to be composed of love and art and sex and death." —San Francisco Chronicle

Harriet Scott Chessman’s Ohio Angels, the book she wrote before her bestselling and critically acclaimed Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, is an intimate and a lyrical story about friendship and family struggles. Hallie, a painter who now lives in Brooklyn, returns to her family home in Ohio, where she unearths a secret about her parents. Her discovery sheds light on her mother’s depression, which shadowed her own childhood, and helps her understand her own inability to have children. In her hometown, Hallie reconnects with a beloved childhood friend, Rose, who is now a writer and pregnant with her third child.

Chessman beautifully evokes the childhood memories of the two friends, illuminating their very different lives. As in Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, Chessman’s compassionate and perceptive gaze reveals an entire new world for us—one that is subtle, alive, and deeply honest.