Search - Burning Bright

I have read all of Tracy Chevalier's books. This one didn't measure up to the others. The story line was weak, chaotic and rambling at times. It could hve been so much more interesting. If you like period novels ,that take place in 19th century London, you will probably still enjoy this. She gives great discriptions of foggy old London and the poverty & misery that existed at that time. I just did not find as good and riviting as her other books. The ending was strange. I felt like she had a deadline to meet and just gave up on it. Too bad. This book had so much potential.

From Publishers Weekly
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 (1757–1827). 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. (Mar.)
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An unusual and lovely book.....unexpected in a gentle, intelligent way. Some history, some poetry, and a wonderful weaving of events. Really very good.

I think you either like this author or you don't, this is the second book i have tried of hers and just could not get into. The novel sounded like i would love it, but the writting just left me "Blah". I had to force myself to continue each page that i read and then when i found myself rereading the same page over again because i didn't retain any of it the first time, i knew this was going to be a long drawn out process with little reward. I had to give up. I am sure it will have an audience but i am just not in it.

I absolutely loved the book.By the time I was done , I couldn't wait and get another book of Tracy Chevalier.
It depicts 18th century London beautifully with William Blake in the center of it.