Actually 3.5 stars based purely on the brilliance of the writing and storytelling vs. my engagement with the characters. Anyone enamored of the Bloomsbury Group and/or literary historical fiction will love this book. Written as a series of (fictional) diary entries by Vanessa Stephen Bell interspersed with letters, cables, and facsimiles of travel tickets from her sister Virginia Stephen Woolf and other members of their circle, we get an intimate glimpse into the early evolution of the Bloomsbury Group from 1905 through 1912. My rating is totally due to my indifference to the characters. I've only read a few novels from the writers in this group and have no background in their artistic oeuvre. I started and ended with a mild curiosity about these writers and artists, but never formed any passion for them. I had known Virginia was troubled, but she comes off schizophrenic and a little sociopathic in this story. As a group, they seemed to lead insulated privileged lives totally dedicated to their own passions (sex and art in all its forms) and disengaged from any larger social movements or class struggle which seethed at the the time--not my kind of people. In spite of my indifference to the characters, I give Parmar full marks for craft. She built her book beautiful sentence by beautiful sentence, layering her work like the artists of this period layered paint to give us a stunning impressionistic novel. I received an Advanced Reading Copy of this book from the publisher, but that did not influence my review.