It's lucky for us that author Tracy Chevalier went to a
William Blake exhibit at
the Tate Museum in 2001. She bought a souvenir notebook with
a Blake
image on the cover and said one day she'd write about Blake.
The day arrived,
over two years since she saw the original exhibit, and her
fourth novel,
BURNING BRIGHT, is a gorgeous literary feat of imagination
and narrative crafted
around the life of Blake.
The opening pages of the novel draw the reader in vividly to
the daily life of
late-eighteenth century London and the emotional risk of a
country family,
the Kellaway's, moving to the city to work for a circus. The
descriptions of
circus life are so fantastic that I never even needed to
William Blake to show
up in the story! Most of the novel is told through the eyes
of children: The
country boy Jem Kellaway learning how to be street-savvy
from Maggie
Butterfield, Masie Kellaway's dangerous infatuation with the
handsome son of
the circus owner, and, of course, the hazardous risk of
William Blake's free
thinking attitude during the days of the French Revolution
and it's impact on
English life. She also creates beautiful vignettes of daily
life that are so vivid
that you can smell horses in the circus tent, fire in the
hearths, and blood on
the city streets. Chevalier's distinguished ability to bring
yesterday alive is
one reason Girl with a Pearl Earring went on to be Oscar
nominated film. She
crafts her research with genuine emotion and that makes her
writing
absolutely impossible to put down, this book included.
Chevalier continues to burn bright in her quest to
understand woman in
history. Currently she is working on a novel about a
fabulous woman know as
Mary Anning, a 19th century fossil collector who discovered
the first pre-
dinosaur fossils on the rocky cliffs of England. The drama
kicks in when Mary
sells her findings to famous male geologists that steal her
glory while she
lives in poverty. Chevalier is the sort of writer that once
you read one of her
books you'll want to read everything she's written and I
can't wait for her
next book to publish!
From the bestselling author of Girl With a Pearl
Earring comes a stirring eighteenth-century coming-of-
age tale
Tracy Chevalier, author of the
international bestseller Girl With a Pearl Earring,
returns with another brilliantly rendered historical tale
set in the waning days of eighteenth-century London. Poet,
artist, and printer William Blake works in obscurity as
England is rocked by the shock waves of the French
Revolution. Next door, the Kellaway family has just moved
in, and country boy Jem Kellaway strikes up a tentative
friendship with street?savvy Maggie Butterfield. As their
stories intertwine with Blake?s, the two children navigate
the confusing and exhilarating path to adolescence, and
inspire the poet to create the work that enshrined his
genius.
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