Dan With a Pearl Earring

 The great Tracy Chevalier offers her five favourite frontier novels on Goodreads this month. All True makes the list! I'm honoured to be in the company of Laura Ingalls Wilder (my inner child is screeching for joy) and Cormac McCarthy (present self screeching too). It's also lovely to see what Tracy says about my book here:

"I am so glad this novel will be published in the U.S. later in 2016, as it gets inside the mind of one of America's most enduring pioneer folk heroes and strips him bare. Early pioneer Daniel Boone is mostly known for his coonskin cap, but in Hawley's version he is a peculiar man with a habit of leaving his family to go hunting and taking years to return. Hawley writes about Boone's relationship with Native Americans and with the harsh landscape he survives in a manner both dreamlike and enthralling."

OK, we know Dan hated coonskin caps, but we're not sure exactly how he looked. I wish there were more than one portrait done of him in his lifetime. Tracy deftly handles the nature of art and portraits in her book, Girl With a Pearl Earring. Here's our only visual of Dan, in which he's an old man, next to Vermeer's equally mysterious Girl.
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