Following the award-winning Burning Silk, the Textile Trilogy picks up the story of two families, one Native American, the other French Huguenot, with the central novel in the Trilogy, Linen Shroud.
Here, as the changes that brought civil war to the United States gather and then break, a savage transformation challenges our dreams of possibilities on this new continent, transplanting the industrial revolution over the sensory world we evolved with as agricultural humans.
Pitched battles for the future are underway, echoing the bloody battle between North and South:
*Will the women of European bloodlines win the respect and equity their Native American sisters enjoy in their matrilineal culture?
*Will the craft village be able to hold out against the onslaught of the Lowell model, the factory’s assault on the fabric of community?
In Linen Shroud Destiny Kinal beautifully illuminates how our ancestors approached conundrums similar to the ones we are facing in our time now, with vibrantly alive characters expressing both Native and European values. How does fl ax–a tough and finicky plant fiber with a willowy blue flower– transform into the luminous satiny textile that lasts for generations, growing more soft and supple with time? The formative struggles that Linen Shroud draws on suggest that the conflicts our ancestors succumbed to or mastered in the nineteenth century have shaped us to find solutions today to the insoluble.
The final novel in the Textile Trilogy, Oil & Water, taking place on our planet’s earliest oil fields on the border of western New York and Pennsylvania, will pair off two visions of the future: an arts and crafts sensibility, which called on hand, eye, and heart to create a sustainable way-of-life against the explosive possibilities of the Age of Invention.
Here at the end of the Petroleum Age, scientists and philosophers say we will not enjoy another century on this planet unless we come up with a New Dream. The Textile Trilogy invites readers to discover for yourselves what we may have left behind of inestimable value in the nineteenth century that we can marry to the best of the twentieth century.
