Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. Readers will love the journey and learn much on the way.Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself.
Like Elizabeth, this story never stands still. Although Elizabeth likely has more chutzpah than a Puritan girl of the mid-1600s would have had, readers will enjoy her penchant for activities such as hurling herself out of a moving carriage to escape men with nefarious intentions and jumping from a burning building into the Thames despite being unable to swim. Blankman does a masterful job of wrapping fiction around historical facts and making barely possible details seem plausible and real. This work of historical fiction includes historical figures and events such as Galileo and writer Samuel Pepys, the 1666 plague, and the Great Fire of London. Joined by Italian Antonio Viviani, and later by Robert Crofts, the bastard son of the king, Elizabeth recovers Paradise Lost from her memory and unearths clues in the poem that she uses to attempt to save her father.
When King Charles II’s henchmen burst into the Milton home, burn the incomplete manuscript of Paradise Lost, and imprison the writer in London, Elizabeth leaves home to save her father and his magnum opus. Blankman weaves religion, science, literary genius, poetry, and romance into a mystery that, if solved, could turn the world upside down.Įlizabeth serves as amanuensis for her father, John Milton, who was blinded by a chemical purported to make the dead live.
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