Reaction was mixed. Some liked it, and revelled in the visual 'painterliness' of it (chiefly, the sighted), while others viewed it as a Harlequin romance with a bit of history thrown in (chiefly, the blind). We talked about the limitations, and advantages, of a first-person narration, and the difficulties of taking our present-day fixation with romance and marriage for love and inserting it in a time when marriage was a contract for survival, how difficult it is to write convincingly in the voice of a child, and how hard it is to know when, and how, to stop writing.