Falling Angels
One of my all time favorite authors at the moment is Tracy Chevalier. Falling Angels is Chevalier’s follow up book to ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. I love the way Chevalier chooses a historical moment in time and weaves a story around it. Falling Angels actually takes place in a London cemetery where two families visiting neighboring graves the day after Queen Victoria’s death meet up for the first time. The daughters of these two families and the gravedigger’s son become best friends. In those days this was just not done. I found Chevalier’s description of the etiquette about death, funerals and graveyards during the Victorian era to be extremely fascinating. Thanks to this book my view of cemeteries and gravedigger’s will never be the same. Falling Angels also gives us a glimpse of the sufferage movement of that time. In Italy March 8th is celebrated every year by Italian women to honor the women who died during the suffrage movements trying to obtain equal rights to men to vote and run for office. Reading about how passionate and to what lengths these women went to get these right for us women has given me a new respect for the celebration of this day.
