Presented to: Kimberley Heuston
For: Dante's Daughter
Though Dante's Daughter is set in Italy and France in the early 1300s, and depicts a time and culture far removed from the lives of modern youth, it shows that people are the same throughout the ages, that family and home and love are important no matter when or where you live. This is a tender story of a girl who does not ask to be remembered, only to be loved. She is swept along by the choices her parents make until she is finally old enough to make choices of her own. Through all that, she manages to discover and develop her own talents and dreams and to touch the lives of others. Kimberley Heuston's depiction of the life of a young girl who lived centuries ago is fresh and insightful. It resonates with the longings and frustrations of any time period and brings its readers closer to characters that would otherwise be perceived as foreign and inaccessible. History may not say much about the daughter of Dante Alighieri, but Kimberley Heuston gives her readers the chance to love her, and all the other girls no one remembers but who, like Bice, were on the fringes of recorded events where they dreamed their own dreams and found love and loss, just as we do.