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5 alluring stars to Ecstasy! ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

(Last vacation review, I promise! 😉)

In college, I had a poster of Klimt’s painting, The Kiss, hanging on my dorm room wall. It was sultry and magical. My love for art and art history was sparked by my beloved high school art teacher. I think she saw a lack of confidence in me, and in retrospect, I feel she took every opportunity to bring that out. I yearn for books about art as a result, especially in my favorite genre, historical fiction. All of that to say, when I saw Ecstasy’s cover and the synopsis, I knew I had to read this book.

Set at the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, Ecstasy is the story of a most-intriguing woman, Alma Schindler. Daughter of an artist, Alma is not only a brilliant pianist, she is a talented composer. She has the opportunity to seek further training to become a star composer, but her mother would not let her because she was female.

Alma’s first kiss was by none other than Gustav Klimt. She later marries Gustav Mahler, a composer, who forbids her music and wants her to be a wife and mother. Married for many years, Alma and Mahler have an up and down marriage, but Mahler is quite obsessed with Alma. She has an affair with Walter Gropius, a famous architect, and later moves on to Franz Werfel, novelist and poet. Schindler has each of these men entranced with her. She is the muse for each and probably the greatest love.

Ecstasy is very much about Alma’s coming of age during a time when women had strict expectations, but culturally and creatively, an era of possibility was simultaneously opening up, and Alma fully embraces it. She is a woman ahead of her time, testing the boundaries that try to contain her, jumping over them, and flourishing with possibilities that she creates for herself.

Alma Schindler had a full life, and in reading her life’s story, I had to be patient with the details and settle in to this book. When one woman is a composer, an author, a daughter, a mother, a wife, a lover, and a muse for various artists, there is much content to be shared! I found Alma enchanting and energizing, and I wish that more people knew her story.

Thank you to Mary Sharratt, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Edelweiss for the ARC. Ecstasy will be released on April 10, 2018.