Life-Tangles

Rhoda Frith's journal opens as her mother comes home from seven years in India with the twins Rhoda has hardly seen, and Rhoda means to have her mother to herself at last — except that her half-sisters, their aunt and her own quick temper are all in the way. Agnes Giberne wrote science for children and fiction for girls with the same clear hand, and this is a frank book about jealousy inside a family, written in the voice of the one who feels it. Fifty-seven plates by painters including Vilhelm Hammershøi and John Everett Millais trace the quiet rooms and watchful interiors that give Rhoda's tangled household its weather.