SHADE AND LIGHT

"Shade and Light (Portmay Press) is a bewitchingly simple, modern novel filled with traditional complexities that entwine plot and character as an artist layers colors, crafting a final image to give pause, to make the viewer look deeper and question the depths of the portrait on display." Read more from Mountain Times...

PRINTZ

"If you are of the perceptive type, and have been very much in love — romantic, platonic, familial — you are able to recognize the precise moment in the relationship when the veil first slips. The moment when the prince’s white horse shows a tinge of gray, or a scratch is teased from the princess’ pedestal. From that moment, the relationship is forever altered and a new course is directed, one grounded in reality." Read more from Mountain Times or listen to the Printz Podcast.

"Jacob Printz, apparently in his early 40s, is a political campaign manager who can talk his way out of anything. But after his sister, Catherine, dies, he drops the various strands of his life and flies to Paris, with no plans other than to escape grief. Greta Hatler, 12 years Jacob's junior, is similarly aimless; during a semester studying art history in Florence, Greta falls in love with her Italian lecturer, Tomasso. But now the semester is over, Greta is in Paris, and all she has is Tomasso's ring and vague guilt. Tomasso remains a mystery for much of the novel as Greta attempts to piece together her affair and reconcile her memories; the last thing that she recalls about Tomasso is that he may be dying. In Paris, Jacob and Greta are thrown together not by romantic attraction but by twists of fate. Greta loses the ring, and Jacob returns it to her. But the cafe to which they retreat almost becomes the target of a suicide bomber. This layer of danger brings the two characters closer as they confront their fears and grief." Read more from Kirkus Review...

"Two strangers, both Americans, meet in Paris with heavy hearts to form the basis for a fine literary novel, "Printz," by Maryann D'Agincourt.

Jacob Printz of Philadelphia visits Paris just to get away for a while. His career as a political campaign organizer is on hold after his beloved sister dies after an auto accident.

Greta Hatler from the Boston area has just taken the train from Florence, Italy, to Paris' Gare de Lyon station after her art class in Florence ends with a visit to the Uffizi Gallery. She is in love with Tommaso, one of the instructors, who coincidentally was injured as a pedestrian by a speeding car in Florence on Hatler's last scheduled day there." Read more from San Antonio Express-News...

GLIMPSES OF GAUGUIN

"Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?" This fundamental question, once posed by French artist Paul Gauguin, forms the scaffolding for this novel. Its protagonist, Jocelyn, takes a piercing, introspective look at her past. It's only now, as a middle-aged woman, that she recognizes hat every family "possesses a prevailing philosophy"--one that brings them together in complex ways. For her and her parents, the central fulcrum was art, and in her own life, the "philosophy" was manifested by a Canadian painter, Alex Martaine, whose work appears to have been inspired by Gauguin's. Alex's affair with Jocelyn's mother deeply unsettled Jocelyn, who was, at the time, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. In the present day, she uses the title of Gauguin's painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (pictured on the book's cover) as the basis for her own voyage of self-discovery. In three sections that tackle each of the title's questions, Jocelyn takes readers from her claustrophobic early years through middle age as she searches for the meaning of life. Although her early rebellion takes a familiar, almost predictable form, readers may overlook it as one of the few weapons in a confused teenager's arsenal. D'Agincourt's economical prose is frustratingly clinical at times, working much too hard to adhere to the "glimpses" promised in the novella's title. and, as a result, it gives readers little else. Yet these moments mirror the feel of childhood and the gradual process of self-realization remarkably well--images pieced together in broad bush strokes. At one point, for example, Jocelyn looks at the aforementioned Gauguin painting and observes that its "rich and exotic" colors are "out of keeping wit the detachment in the characters' aces...The uninhibited sensuality oppresses me, entraps me."

"A precisely rendered image of a quest to tease out life's larger meaning." -- Kirkus Reviews

JOURNAL OF EVA MORELLI

"Satisfying reading...[Maryann D'Agincourt has] told the story of three people whose lives are intertwined in ways they don't suspect and brought them out in the end wiser, gentler and eager to live life well." -- Sandra Birdsell, member of the Order of Canada and author of Waiting for Joe and Katya

"Maryann D'Agincourt's elegant prose is wonderfully descriptive, fluid, and, at times, even lyrical. There are three complicated and richly developed characters, and the short chapter format briskly moves the story along. A bit like a thriller that has learned self-control with the traction of a mystery, the book hooks you into turning pages with dread and desire to read on. And as you do, your feeling of foreboding only deepens." -- Barnes and Noble

"Shadowy Intimates and Selves - The haunting copy of Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Two Figures painting (almost faceless and inscrutable in a pathless wilderness) reproduced as the cover of Maryann D'Agincourt's Journal of Eva Morelli novel (Portmay Press 2013) is highly suggestive of its mysterious contents. These relate essentially to the private views and problems of three characters, living, say in 2000, in a New Hampshire seaside town near Boston, variously concerned with the memory of now dead parental or other unsteady enigmatic intimates in their past with in two cases a hint as well of their own confused and shaky relationships in their present." -- Brian Kingzett Taylor

ALL MOST

"Loved all the different stories. So true to life." -- Amazon

"Author, Maryann D'Agincourt, has put together twelve stories showing snippets that delve into individual's lives of various aspects into their persona. It gives the reader an insight into one's feelings whether it be through music or art; past or present. It gives us a display of people's emotions and how they are affected by other's actions or words, and how they can greatly influence one's future... A wonderful array of literary fiction." -- Goodreads