p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Times; min-height: 14.0px} Those of you readers who have read earlier works of Ella Carey know that she has had a lifelong love-affair with France (as is manifest in Paris Time Capsule and The House by the Lake).  In her 2018 novel, The Things We Don’t Say, the action switches back and forth between London and a country farm house in Provence. As Carey is quick to acknowledge, this novel was inspired by the Bloomsbury group, and although she insists that all characters are spun from her imagination, in her acknowledgements she says, “I have long been intrigued by the artist Vanessa Bell and her beautiful relationship with her fellow artist, Duncan Grant.” In the novel, Emma Temple’s story has as its background this intrigue Carey had with Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, and other writers and artists in the Bloomsbury group. Emma is an artist who establishes a kind of sanctuary in Provence for the unconventional bohemian young artists who she makes into her family. It is 1913. She lives there with her husband, Oscar, who is really more like a brother or companion than a husband, and among the other guests is a famous painter by the name of Patrick and his lover Rupert. It is really the deep love between Patrick and Emma that is central to the story, although he is homosexual and she is not. The second strand of the story is told by Emma’s granddaughter, Laura, who is studying violin at the Royal College of Music. Thus the reader is taken back and forth between London in l1980 and Provence in the years leading up to and including World War I and beyond. While Patrick and Emma are not sexual lovers, there love is profound, and Patrick spends years painting a portrait of Emma though he has refused in the past to do portraits of anyone he knows. The painting is his tribute to their love.  Patrick becomes a famous artist and his works are a huge commercial success. For that reason, the paining Ella has is of great value by the time Laura enters the story. Indeed, his work is so famous that Ella is able to secure a loan using it as collateral—a loan large enough to support Laura’s expensive education at the the Royal Academy. Just as art and color are everything to Emma, music is everything to Laura and intensifies the bonds between her and her grandmother. Alas, a well-respected art critic who is considered an expert on Patrick’s paintings, publishes and article in the Times claiming that the Emma portrait is not his work. All the rest of the novel is occupied with this issue. At first Ewan, the art critic, refuses to divulge to Laura how he knows the painting is not genuine, although he insists that he is absolutely certain that it is not.  While the story of the painting and of the threat to Laura’s music education is the thread that weaves together the lives of Ella and Laura, what I found to be the overarching significance of the novel was the descriptions of how the so-called bohemians lived their lives in a world that did not at all share their values. Not unlike the young people in the 6os and 70s, Ella’s ‘family’ believes in free love, is open to homosexuality and to all races, and they are also by and large pacifists in a world just about to be engulfed in a world war.  Because Ella knows all too well how parents can smother the dreams of their children by refusing to support their endeavors, she empathizes completely with Laura when Laura’s parents refuse to support her musical endeavors. Emma’s father had likewise refused to support her love of art, and it is only his early death that allows her to continue with her painting. Color was what inspired her, drawing her away from the coldness of her home life. Her childhood walks with her siblings and their nanny in Kensington Gardens every afternoon had started it, and she’d embraced getting out of the dark and stuffy house close to the park.