Linen Shroud – Destiny Kinal

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 sensory world we evolved with as agricultural humans.

Pitched battles for the soul of 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 flax—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.

Reviews

We are very excited about this praise for Linen Shroud received from Peter Coyote.
“Poet and classics scholar Robert Graves asserted that the epochal event in Western History was the overthrow of the Earth-worshiping, matriarchal, Cretan culture, by the patriarchal, sky-God worshipping Achaeans. Fortunately for them, the Cretan priestesses had sufficient fertility magic and ceremony to insure good crops so that the Achaens were forced into political compromise with them. Hence, in their mythology, Athena, the feminine Goddess of Wisdom was born from Zeus’s forehead, not from intercourse.

“Unfortunately, the magic and wisdom of Native Americans’ was not appreciated by the invaders, and that is where Destiny Kinal’s ambitious, engaging, and profound book begins. A European family of silk merchants, patriarchal Christians of Good will, land in the center of the matriarchal Haudenosaunee people—we call the Iroquois. The cultural collision is complicated by intermarriage and mixed breed children and the book, Linen Shroud, the second of a trilogy, begins to replicate the complex weave of silk made of cultural, emotional, and different spiritual traditions. The scholarship is extraordinary and the reader will be thrilled to incidentally learn about the Wolf Clan ceremony and the ways of treating Flax to make linen. These are integral parts to a story of rich, complex characters, fulfilling their own destinies while they are caught in the great Web of history and born of the mind of Destiny Kinal. A fine and compelling book.”
– Peter Coyote, actor, author, Zen Buddhist priest

KIRKUS INDIE REVIEW for Linen Shroud
“The French Huguenot Duladiers have become successful entrepreneurs in the New World, establishing a thriving silk business, a linen concern, as well as a foothold in opium and tobacco production. Their good fortunes, though, are dependent upon intermarriage with the Montours, who have Native American and French ancestry. The author’s knowledge of the silk and linen trades remains notable. Like its predecessor (Burning Silk, 2011) wildly imaginative.”