The Complex Art of Being Maisie Clark, by Sabrina Kleckner

Maisie, at eighteen, has absorbed everything she can learn about painting portraits from her parents, but she longs to develop a style that is her own.  All of her work looks more or less the same as her father's.  So, she decides to leave New York and study art in London, focusing on every medium except painting in a conscious effort to stretch herself.

The new school year starts off inauspiciously as she nearly gets thrown out of photography class and then accidentally almost maims a fellow student.  But all of these things lead to adventures, some hilarious, some poignant as her term promises new adventures and even a possible romance.

Then an emergency sends her back home to help her parents and she finds that she's grown far more in her time in London than she realized.  And, in fact, her art and her life overall has begun to bloom in its own ways after all.

A lively NA novel whose first half is much better than its second.  The cause of that is that the book is in fact a sequel, albeit an unusual one.  Maisie was first introduced to readers in Kleckner's Art of Running Away in which Maisie is only twelve and dealing with a difficult older brother.  And while the first half of this current novel introduces new characters, the second half leans heavily upon details from the earlier novel from six years earlier.  Without that background, elements of the current story are hard to follow and it fails to stand up on its own.