The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier

 I found the structure of this story both jarring and intriguing. The Rosso family, glassmakers on the island of Murano, age much more slowly than the rest of world. The main character, Orsola Rosso is nine when our story begins in 1486. She is sixty-five in 2019 when it ends. She and her family have lived through the plague, floods, two world wars and the upheaval of technology. Orsola, being a woman, cannot be a glassblower but she finds a fellow woman in another glass blowing family who teachers her to make beads.  There are times when these beads are all that sustain the family. So many changes in art, in Venice, in the world  that this family is forced to accommodate and in rare cases, embrace. I didn't find the charachter of Orsola as angaging as some of the characters in Chevalier's other novels but this was a history I never thought about and a perspective that was also new.