Released date: September 2, 2014
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Audio c.d. and paperback book not yet available
Reviews
The New York Times October 3, 2014
Wren Noorlander, who has a sweet naïveté that often seems younger than her 15 years, occupies a sophisticated, insulated sort of Manhattan existence. She attends a private girls school on the Upper East Side. Her father is the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, her 10-year-old sister is a TV chef and their big, happy family resides in a five-story brownstone. Before Wren, who is dyslexic and a talented artist, meets Nolan, her focus is on family, the friends she’s grown up with and working on her application to an art program in St.-Rémy, France, next to the asylum where van Gogh painted “Starry Night.” But after Wren and Nolan kiss at a museum party, everything changes.
“Starry Night” is a love story, though it’s not the kind you might expect: It’s laden with the rawness, emotional bewilderment and bad decision-making that come with infatuation and heartbreak, all the more intense when it’s experienced for the first time. As Wren explains wistfully on the first page, “I am not sure why the person that I was in love with ended up not wanting to be in love with me anymore.” Though the life she leads is one of privilege, she faces a common problem: the threat of losing herself over a boy. Gillies handles this novel about finding one’s strength and growing up deftly and evocatively.
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