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Textile Trilogy #1
Burning Silk
Award-Winning Finalist in the Literary Fiction category of the 2010 International Book Awards.
Finalist in the Historical Fiction category of the 2010 National Indie Excellence Awards.
In the sensuous and erotic lineage of Anais Nin, Marguerite Duras, and Carole Maso, Destiny Kinal has crafted her debut novel, Burning Silk, to transport the reader. From the first page, we plunge into the rarified and privileged atmosphere of an early-nineteenth-century French perfumerie on the Cote d' Azur, where fragrance scientists cross the threshold into the invisible world of pheromones, hoping to plumb those secrets in the person of the young silk maitresse Catherine Duladier.
A decade later, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we witness Catherine's disciplined but desperate attempts to keep her closely held secret from rising to the surface in the pressure cooker of her family's new silk magnanerie, where silkworms transform mulberry into the cocoon of metamorphosis and Catherine is forced to recognize that love without truth is violence.
Will Catherine be able to ward off threats to her French Huguenot family's dreams of a successful business venture in the New World? As she emerges from her cocoon, will she be able to realize fulfillment in an unconventional menage-a-trois in a time when such utopian possibilities are being entertained in small experimental communities across the Northeast.
Their Native American neighbors, the metis Montours, hold the key to both silkworms and silkworkers becoming native to this assimilation.
Burning Silk is a novel about transformation, compulsion, and genetic destiny.
Finalist in the Historical Fiction category of the 2010 National Indie Excellence Awards.
In the sensuous and erotic lineage of Anais Nin, Marguerite Duras, and Carole Maso, Destiny Kinal has crafted her debut novel, Burning Silk, to transport the reader. From the first page, we plunge into the rarified and privileged atmosphere of an early-nineteenth-century French perfumerie on the Cote d' Azur, where fragrance scientists cross the threshold into the invisible world of pheromones, hoping to plumb those secrets in the person of the young silk maitresse Catherine Duladier.
A decade later, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, we witness Catherine's disciplined but desperate attempts to keep her closely held secret from rising to the surface in the pressure cooker of her family's new silk magnanerie, where silkworms transform mulberry into the cocoon of metamorphosis and Catherine is forced to recognize that love without truth is violence.
Will Catherine be able to ward off threats to her French Huguenot family's dreams of a successful business venture in the New World? As she emerges from her cocoon, will she be able to realize fulfillment in an unconventional menage-a-trois in a time when such utopian possibilities are being entertained in small experimental communities across the Northeast.
Their Native American neighbors, the metis Montours, hold the key to both silkworms and silkworkers becoming native to this assimilation.
Burning Silk is a novel about transformation, compulsion, and genetic destiny.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
Paperback
First published May 15, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 28, 2019
There is an art to writing a novel; an arc of movement, a thread of thought, an inner fire stoked by imagination and all the writers come before. A writer can be a person who strings words together in an endless river; or a writer can be an artist. Taking paper, ink, and words; creating something otherworldly, something elsewhere. Destiny Kinal’s novel Burning Silk, the first in the Textile Trilogy, is the product of this type of writer.
Set in and around the 1840s, Burning Silk begins the story of the Duladier family. With a rich history of silk spinning to their name, the Duladier’s have a long family tree of maitresses extended down the female line, women who nurture and develop the moth cocon to bring about its silk. Catherine, as the youngest and newest maitresse, takes us from 1839 Grasse France, where she experiences her first painful introduction into the role of a Duladier woman; to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a decade later as wife and mother, to launch the American-based Duladier silk enterprise. She may be on another continent, but Catherine has never escaped the inner torment of her earlier years, and she is forever anguished by the experiences of her youth. Her fear, her pain, sets about a series of events from which the Duladiers may never recover.
To say this novel is about silk spinners in the nineteenth century is a trite understatement. Silk as a fabric is sensual by definition, and though Burning Silk is marketed as ”erotic fiction,” don't confuse it with an easy paperback romance. It is an epic work of fiction, doused in rich historical language and time, exploring the role of woman as mother, daughter, sister, lover, and self. A complex, multilayered book, Burning Silk tells a story with power and identity, letting the characters develop into themselves. It exposes given certainties and changes them; a child becoming a woman, the first experience of sexuality, confronting ones innermost desires, the voices used to speak to ourselves and others. It is truly unlike any book I’ve ever read.
Look past the editorial distractions of first and third person point of view shifts, for they are not perfectly constructed. Continue past the beginning plot, Catherine’s ordeal is glaring and painful and difficult. Read on because you will be rewarded with a lush and luxurious story, developed and fruitful, deep and melancholically beautiful.
I received this book from Destiny herself, and wasn’t sure how I would feel about the novel when I first started. As a book reviewer, however, I am pledged to objectivity and I was rewarded for persisting past the parts that would normally turn me away. The words, the characters, the immense story, won me over. I could hardly set it aside at the end. Like a true artist, Destiny Kinal amazed me with her raw talent. I eagerly await the next installment of the Duladier’s story in the Textile Trilogy.
Set in and around the 1840s, Burning Silk begins the story of the Duladier family. With a rich history of silk spinning to their name, the Duladier’s have a long family tree of maitresses extended down the female line, women who nurture and develop the moth cocon to bring about its silk. Catherine, as the youngest and newest maitresse, takes us from 1839 Grasse France, where she experiences her first painful introduction into the role of a Duladier woman; to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a decade later as wife and mother, to launch the American-based Duladier silk enterprise. She may be on another continent, but Catherine has never escaped the inner torment of her earlier years, and she is forever anguished by the experiences of her youth. Her fear, her pain, sets about a series of events from which the Duladiers may never recover.
To say this novel is about silk spinners in the nineteenth century is a trite understatement. Silk as a fabric is sensual by definition, and though Burning Silk is marketed as ”erotic fiction,” don't confuse it with an easy paperback romance. It is an epic work of fiction, doused in rich historical language and time, exploring the role of woman as mother, daughter, sister, lover, and self. A complex, multilayered book, Burning Silk tells a story with power and identity, letting the characters develop into themselves. It exposes given certainties and changes them; a child becoming a woman, the first experience of sexuality, confronting ones innermost desires, the voices used to speak to ourselves and others. It is truly unlike any book I’ve ever read.
Look past the editorial distractions of first and third person point of view shifts, for they are not perfectly constructed. Continue past the beginning plot, Catherine’s ordeal is glaring and painful and difficult. Read on because you will be rewarded with a lush and luxurious story, developed and fruitful, deep and melancholically beautiful.
I received this book from Destiny herself, and wasn’t sure how I would feel about the novel when I first started. As a book reviewer, however, I am pledged to objectivity and I was rewarded for persisting past the parts that would normally turn me away. The words, the characters, the immense story, won me over. I could hardly set it aside at the end. Like a true artist, Destiny Kinal amazed me with her raw talent. I eagerly await the next installment of the Duladier’s story in the Textile Trilogy.
June 5, 2010
A lush, intriguing book focusing on the lives of women of the silk as they brought their long traditions of raising and tending silkworms from various old world countries to settle in Pennsylvania. This book involves a love story as complex and intricate as the silkworm's handiwork. The writing is beautiful--spiritual in places, the plot compelling, and the context well-established: exactly what this reader considers the backbone of a good historical novel. Burning Silk is the first in a trilogy. I look forward to the others!
August 24, 2024
I did not finish this book. It was not at all what I was expecting.
I think I was expecting a chill historical fiction book with a few spicy scenes. What I got should have come with a content warning. About 50 pages in there are some very graphic rape scenes. Not what I was expecting. I think the book (as far as I read) handled the trauma of that well but it was just not something I was prepared for.
I pressed on in reading it and got about 1/3 of the way through before giving up. This book is very odd and as far as I got didn’t have a plot, switched from 1st person to third randomly, and seemed to still be setting things up. I just wasn’t enjoying myself.
The final straw was when the perspective changed to a completely different person without warning and then that character spent an entire chapter contemplating rape.
Not my cup of tea.
I think I was expecting a chill historical fiction book with a few spicy scenes. What I got should have come with a content warning. About 50 pages in there are some very graphic rape scenes. Not what I was expecting. I think the book (as far as I read) handled the trauma of that well but it was just not something I was prepared for.
I pressed on in reading it and got about 1/3 of the way through before giving up. This book is very odd and as far as I got didn’t have a plot, switched from 1st person to third randomly, and seemed to still be setting things up. I just wasn’t enjoying myself.
The final straw was when the perspective changed to a completely different person without warning and then that character spent an entire chapter contemplating rape.
Not my cup of tea.
August 9, 2017
I was imagining a kind of a dry historical fiction about the textile industry, and boy was I wrong. This book is brimming with sexual energy throughout and explicit sexual imagery. Kinal flows easily back and forth between the passion of sex, the passion of emotion and the passion religious fervor. She has a great sense for the physical and biological, and somehow makes the practicalities of the silk industry and the biology of the silk worm all seem sexy and dramatic. And of course the book is female centered and focused on empowered women trying to shape history.
November 8, 2025
Terrible editing!
This may be the worst copyedited book that I have purchased on Amazon (and I have been a customer since when books were all that Amazon sold).
On top of that, the plot is full of holes and needs a proper editor. I could not finish after half-way, and I rarely set aside a book.
Sadly, I imagine that the next two books in the series suffer from the same problems.
This may be the worst copyedited book that I have purchased on Amazon (and I have been a customer since when books were all that Amazon sold).
On top of that, the plot is full of holes and needs a proper editor. I could not finish after half-way, and I rarely set aside a book.
Sadly, I imagine that the next two books in the series suffer from the same problems.
December 10, 2019
Worse book I've read in along time. could not finish it!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews