Temptation Island

The opening chapter of Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s When Water Became Blue offers an abrupt assertion: “I didn’t need you, and yet you came.” The unnamed female narrator, a writer attending a summertime retreat on an island in the St. Lawrence River, is taking time away from her partner and her daughter to find the space to work. There she meets a “strange” and “magnificent” painter who stokes her desire immediately. Their affair unspools in sensual, poetic detail.

Setting up on the shoreline, the artist has made it his mission to accurately capture the blue of the water. While the writer watches him work, conversations flow about art history, colour, and depiction. The book segues into the narrator’s intense longing for this man, often by her speaking directly to him but also by her sharing her thoughts on literary portrayals of female yearning: “At the end of the nineteenth century, voices of women authors emerge undercover. Tired of being denied part of...