Set in boisterous, rebellious Boston on the eve of the American Revolution, Blindspot ingeniously weaves together the fictional stories of Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter and notorious libertine, and Fanny Easton, a fallen woman from one of Boston’s most powerful families who disguises herself as a boy to become Jameson’s defiant and seductive apprentice. Together with an African-born doctor, they investigate the death of the famous revolutionary leader Samuel Bradstreet.
John Lee and Cassandra Campbell are delightful in this witty historical novel, chock full of well-researched and amusing tidbits of life in eighteenth-century Boston. In alternating chapters, we meet Scottish rogue Stewart Jameson, a portrait painter who's run away from his creditors in Edinburgh, and Fanny Easton, a young girl with a sordid past who disguises herself as a boy and becomes Jamie's apprentice. Lee has Jamie's raffish attitude and moral dilemma down pat, and Campbell nicely captures Fanny's predicament as she struggles to remember that she's a boy. Authors Kamensky and Lepore, both historians, offer clever conversations and situations involving politics, growing unrest in the Colonies, slavery, women's rights, romance, and even murder. Lee and Campbell keep things light and entertaining. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
Library Journal (starred review and Editor’s Pick)...
“A beautifully crafted debut historical novel that is at once a tender love story, a murder mystery, and a brilliant sociological and political portrait of a turbulent time.”
About the Author
JANE KAMENSKY is a professor of American history and chair of the History Department at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Exchange Artist and Governing the Tongue, among other books. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is currently writing a biography of the eighteenth-century American portrait painter, Gilbert Stuart. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two sons.
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