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June 2007

Burning Bright by Tracy Chevalier   «ordinary»

I've read every book Tracy Chevalier has published. So far, this has been the worst one I've read. That isn't to say it was bad, it just was not as good as the other ones.
Started: June 16, 2007
Finished: June 23, 2007
Summary: Author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, set in the home/studio of Vermeer, and other novels, Chevalier turns in an oblique look at poet and painter William Blake (1757Ð1827). Following the accidental death of their middle son, the Kellaways, a Dorsetshire chair maker and family, arrive in London's Lambeth district during the anti-Jacobin scare of 1792. Thomas Kellaway talks his way into set design work for the amiable circus impresario Philip Astley, whose fireworks displays provide the same rallying point that the guillotine is providing in Paris. Astley's libertine horseman son, John, sets his sights on Kellaway's daughter, Maisie (an attention she rather demurely returns). Meanwhile, youngest surviving Kellaway boy Jem falls for poor, sexy firebrand Maggie Butterfield. Blake, who imagined heaven and hell as equally incandescent and earth as the point where the two worlds converge, is portrayed as a murky Friar Laurence figure whose task is to bind and loosen the skeins of young love going on around him-that is, until a Royalist mob intrudes into his garden to sound out his rather advanced views on liberty, equality and fraternity. While the setting is dramatically fertile, there's no spark to the dialogue or plot, and allusions to Blake's work and themes are overbaked. (from amazon.com)
Quotes: "We're all going to Hell, I expect. I'll wager there is no Heaven."
"Maggie, don't say that !" Maisie cried.
"Well, maybe there's a Heaven for you, Miss. Piddle. You'll be awfully lonely there though."
"I don't see why there has to be just one or t'other," Jem said. "Can't there be something that's more a bit of both?"
"That's the world, Jem," Maggie said. (p 175-6)