This work of historical fiction creates an intricate tapestry from strands of fact. The fourteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri is known to have had a daughter, but little is known about her. Kimberley Heuston has imagined a rich and complex life story for the girl, whose name here is Antonia. The novel begins when Antonia is five. She adores her father, but is already aware of a tension between him and her mother. Political turmoil—a running theme throughout the story—forces Antonia and her brothers to flee their home. It is the first of many journeys she will take. Her brilliant, passionate father is a sometimes fleeting, unpredictable figure in her life from that point on. He’s unreliable, as her mother already knew, because his immersion in the political intrigue of the day holds more attraction for him than family life. Until she’s a teenager, Antonia stays in the home of aunt and uncle. She feels safe and loved there. She also discovers her passion and talent for drawing and painting as she spends time in her painter uncle’s studio. When Antonia’s a teenager, Dante, battered by changing political winds, blows back into her life, asking her to accompany him to Paris, where he plans to study. She ends up staying with a communal group of women in Paris, a community begun to give unmarried women and widows an alternative to the cloistered life of nuns. The women are artisans, and Antonia relishes the opportunity to use her talents, as well as the loving friendships she forms. Again politics intervene. When Dante decides to return to Italy, the still-teenage Antonia goes with him, grieving the recent death of her closest companions. As Antonia grows into adulthood, her losses mount, and so does her resolve to set the course of her own life rather than be controlled by the choices of others and the expectations for women in the world in which she lives. Heuston’s intricately detailed and fascinating story has intriguing and well-developed characters, an incredible sense of time and place, and a hero who’s ultimate coming of age is a triumph for self-determination. (Ages 13–16)

When political upheaval forces her family to flee and separate, Antonia takes her brother's advice to heart as she journeys through Italy and France with her father, the poet Dante Alighieri. She becomes a pilgrim who also embraces interior journeys: she struggles with her difficult, inattentive father; with her heart's desire to paint as her father writes; and with her first tastes of young love. All the while Antonia harbors dreams that others tell her women are not entitles to dream. Dante's Daughter portrays a life in full, one that beautifully answers Antonia's own questions: "Had my journey made me wise? Had my secret griefs made me strong?" This highly imagined story--based on the few known facts of Antonia's life--is set against the dramatic background of pre-Renaissance Europe, rendered in rich detail by storyteller and historian Kimberley Heuston.