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But this Catherine, fingertips holding the wisp of a mulberry tree, eyes penetrating to its generative spark, is a rarified creation. Not any beautiful woman, not a prize for a deserving man. Like a wine spicy with terroir, like the smell and taste of truffle ripening beneath an oaken grove that pigs and dogs would die to possess, Catherine is Hessian soil, is Cévenole chestnut flour. And, though I do not wish it on her, it may turn out to be that Catherine will not transplant well from where she was rooted. Like the silkseed we were sent from the Far East, Catherine herself is a gamble. And we are bound to support her. |
Burning Silk, the debut novel by Destiny Kinal, is a sensual adventure that begins where textiles and fragrances interlace among the women at the helm of a new silk enterprise in the craftsmaking community of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. In this forgotten chapter of history, saliva and silkworms are the tools of industry and women must struggle to wrest the dominion of their business from the hands of men. The first in a trilogy, Burning Silk introduces the saga of the Duladier House of Silk through the tale of its youngest maitresse, Catherine, during her migration from France to expand her family’s business to the New World. Catherine must protect both her silkworms and herself from parfumiers out to exploit the fragrance of passion, all the while struggling to uphold her role as the head of her magnanerie against a personal secret that threatens to unravel everything. Burning Silk is a novel infused with eroticism, which explores family, gender, love, dishonesty, and the risk that others might recognize something in us that we will not. Kinal spins a story richly woven with the history of silk guilds and of the matrilineal Native American metis, and, as the transformations of her characters come to parallel the metamorphoses of the moths, a profound analogy about what it really means to be a woman. Awarded finalist in the Best New Fiction and Literary Fiction categories of the 2010 International Book Awards, as well as the Historical Fiction category of the 2010 National Indie Excellence awards, Burning Silk will be stimulating reading for anyone interested in history, feminism, or the intricacies of the human heart.
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