Sabrina Kleckner

All eighteen-year-old Maisie Clark wants to do is leave her tiny town in upstate New York. Crescent Valley is home to Glenna’s, the family-run portrait shop she loves more than anything. But after years of imitating her dad’s artistic style, Maisie fears she will never find her own voice. So, she comes up with a plan: quit working at Glenna’s, go to art school in London, and, most importantly, stop painting portraits. If she can’t find her voice by the end of the year, she’ll give up art entirely. Unfortunately, pushing outside her comfort zone is (surprise!) uncomfortable. Maisie struggles to connect with her eccentric new flatmates, feels farther away from her best friend than ever, and hates every art course she signed up for—especially photography, where her talented but prickly partner, Eli, is not afraid to point out her every mistake on their semester-long project. Maisie is already questioning all her life choices when a crime strikes Glenna’s, reopening old family wounds she thought she’d long healed from. It’ll take even more discomfort, as well as help from Eli, her older brother, Calum, and his earnest boyfriend, Benji, to confront the layers she’s painted over the past. But maybe, just maybe, the keys to finding herself lie closer to home than she realized.

Twelve-year-old Maisie is an artist. When she’s in front of her sketchbook or apprenticing at Glenna’s Portraits, the family-run art shop her grandmother started, the world makes sense. She doesn’t think about Calum, her brother who mysteriously left home and cut ties with her family six years ago, or her parents’ insistence that she “broaden her horizons” and try something new—something that isn’t art. But when Glenna’s Portraits falls on hard times, Maisie’s plan to take over the shop when she’s older and become a lifelong artist starts to crumble. In desperation to make things right, Maisie runs away to London to reconnect with her adult brother, hoping he might be the key to saving the shop. But as Maisie learns about her family’s past from Calum, she starts to rethink everything she’s ever known. Maisie must decide not only if saving her family’s art shop is worth it, but if she can forgive her parents for the mistakes they've made.