Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Whitney Scharer, author of her first novel, The Age Of Light, Released in February by Little, Brown and Company.

White holds a BA in English Literature form Wesleyan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.

Her short fiction has appeared in numerous journals. This, The Age Of Light, as I said, is her first novel.

The Age Of Light gives us a unique and, for most of us, previously unknown life. The life of Lee Miller, a beautiful woman who has graced the covers of Vogue and other high fashion magazines of the time. Her beauty is renowned and her ability to “be a photograph” is only outweighed by her desire “to take one”. She arrives, after having giving up modeling, in Paris in 1929, essentially and eventually penniless but she catches the eye of an artist who’s name IS known to all of us, Man Ray.

He want to continue her life as a model by photographing her but instead Lee persuades hm to take her own as an assistant and even though Man turns out to be something less than the perfect lover, they begin a romance that is both torrid and mutually rewarding in its intensity.

We see Lee in the present, when she has taken on a new look and a new passion, we see her on the battlefields of Europe as the war is ending and she lingers to photograph the hours that haunt her for the rest of her life, but we see her mostly, as she learns to be a photographer, a movie actress and once again, a model.

This woman who previous to this book, was kind of lost in history, comes up with some remarkable ideas that are still important today, but for which she receives little or no correct.

This is a beautiful story about a beautiful woman in many ways.

She does have her flaws and those are filled in seamlessly, but overall, this is a woman that I would like to meet and whom, as so many other men, would probably fall involve with.

With that, welcome Whitney and thank you for joining us today.