Rating: 
Summary: Loved every minute of it.
Review: I dont know why it took me so long to come across this book because it is fabulous. I picked it up to read and I could not put it down until I read the last page. I love the authors easy style of writing, I love the story and I love the characters. I cant wait to read more from Tracy Chevalier.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: This story is a captivating novel with everything I look for. Romance, conspiracy, art; this is one of my favorite books and I recommend this to any teen-adult willing to put up a few days to read it.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful
Review: I read this book for school and loved it. While it was slow in places, the beauty of the story is umistakable. I could truly relate to Griet, and everything she went through. I could see her life clearly. the book showed her as a person and her as a model. The two were in many ways very seperate people. Her hardships with van Ruijven made her a like to maids evrywhere, but she was differnt. Her descriptions of Vermeer were by far the most interesting. His character while not imposing, has such a definite personality. The painting itself is beautiful, but after reading the book I looked at it in a new light. The description of Vermeer readying Griet to be painted, made me constantly turn to the cover to ook at the face of the girl and compare. This is the first good book I have read in a long time and I advise everyone to read it. It's not a long book, but it is powerful.
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Summary: Were they always so serious?
Review: This is set in seventeenth century Holland, so I suppose I'm a bad person to review it because I start with a prejudice against historical novels. I think the novelist should stick to his or her own time. If I want to know how people spoke and thought in the seventeenth century I'll go to Samuel Pepys's Diary. One problem all historical novelists have is with dialog. Do you make people talk in modern colloquial way, which jars, or have them talk with yeahs and forsooths. The usual compromise, which Chevalier adopts in this book, is having them talk in a stilted way with little humor or give and take. This conveys an atmosphere of solemnity. There was a lot of tragedy in the seventeenth century, but some people sometimes had good times. One of them was Leeuwenhoek, who appears as a solemn character in this book. He must have been bubbling over with excitement about Hooke's book on the Microscope when he talked to Vermeer. We know from his letters to the Royal Society how lively and interested in everything he was.
A ten year old child dies of plague in this book, and such terrible things happened then, but it was also possible for an amateur scientist, grinding his own lenses, to enter an unexplored world and start the train of discovery that would stop such things. Leeuwenhoek was the first man to see bacteria.
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Summary: A Economically Told Story About An Engima..
Review: Finally,a writer who doesn't overwrite! Ok,I actually wanted MORE detail as the subject was so interesting. Having been a fan of Vermeer's work,even before reading this book.I felt the"story" behind this painting,although fictionalized,seemed very plausible. Griet is both naive and very intelligent at the same time for she recognises Vermeer's genius. The day-to-day life of the household was also very authentic-feeling; Ms. Chevailer captures the drudgery of being a maid in a realistic,matter-of-fact way. You can see why this girl was willing to pierce her own ears so she could be in the painting,if only to escape her dreary,monotonous life for a brief while. A fine portrait about a famous portrait.
Rating: 
Summary: Insight to a wonderful painting
Review: Tracey Chevalier's idea to write a story about the famous painting 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', by Johannes Vermeer, is very intriguing and unique. Griet, the main character, was often frustrating with her withdrawn manner and lack of confidence in herself. This itself is probably a reflection of her status in society in 17th century Europe. I found it disappointing that the painter himself was not really brought into the story as well as he could have been. We only were given an indepth look into Griet's character, and the story was seen soley from her perspective. The plot was luke warm around the relationship of Griet (his maid) and the painter, but we discover that Griet has an artistic ability, that adds light to an otherwise monotonous plot. I was drawn to reading this book by the idea behind it. It is a good, light read, and one which I recommend .
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Summary: A mesmerizing read
Review: Griet's father loses his sight in an accident, and his ability to provide for his family. His daughter is forced to leave the house to work as a maid. It appears lucky that she is able to work in the house of the painter, Vermeer. However, her unconscious beauty immediately places her in jeopardy: the wife, daughter, and older servant are jealous of the master's apparent, if subtle, interest in her. She grows to love the time she spends in the painter's studio but, in the end, it is her undoing.This novel is taut with sexual tension that is almost never broached directly. The writing is luminous, the story is engaging. Through it, the reader is transported to the village of 17th century Delft, with its small town gossip and worldly prejudices.
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Summary: A Work of Art
Review: I LOVED this book! I finished it in three days and I?m a slow reader. I was surprised that a novel set during the 1660s in Holland could hold any interest for me, but I couldn?t put it down. What I like most is how the story exemplifies the modus operandi of a true artist: His greatest passion is his art, which can be difficult for regular people to fully comprehend. For that artistic passion to be more important than anything else, can be heartbreaking for a young girl such as Griet. Maybe it?s because I?m an artist myself, went to art school, have been surrounded by artists for so many years, that I could appreciate this novel, because so much of it is true when applied to real life. However, I think anyone will fall in love with this book. I also loved the way Chevalier described the way Vermeer saw the world, what set his vision apart from the people around him. The way he taught his vision to Griet was beautiful. It was wonderful to see how Griet slowly understood the complexities in the colors of our world?she seemed perceptive beyond her years, or just one of the few people in town who could understand, and Vermeer saw this in her from the beginning. Of course the love triangle in the novel was terrific. All the drama within the Vermeer family, their patrons and friends, and the local butcher?s son, was completely irresistible! However, it wasn?t like a soap opera by any means. Every character was complicated, everyone had their assets and flaws, which made this story all the more emotional. I was just sucked in! There were so many aspects to this story, so many interesting issues going on: Such as Cornelia, one of the Vermeer children who was determined to bring Griet to shame. The unwavering love that Pietre the son had for Griet, Maria Thins who masterminded the business, and of course, Griet?s own transformation from an innocent child to a young woman, with all the confusion, frustration, discoveries and heartbreaks that came with it. Simply written, but filled with forshadowing and symbolic acts, this book, to me, is a work of art to be remembered.
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Summary: Unexplainable incredible book
Review: This was the best book I have read in years. I can't explain why I was so caught up in this story. I'm certainly not an authority on art, but the author was able to make me feel the soul of the artist. The understanding between Vermeer and Griet was so solid, so real, so lovely. Trying to look at this book from 21st century standards is ridiculous (one of the reviewers called her "snotty" because she didn't like the blood on the hands of Pieter the son). Griet was an artist also, Vermeer recognized this. A perfect book to savor.
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Summary: Girl With a Pearl Idea, Poor Execution
Review: Girl With a Pearl Idea, Poor Execution
Girl With a Pearl Earring, by Tracy Chevalier, provides an interesting, though far from "seamless" (as it is billed) mesh of history and fiction. The novel traces the story of Griet, daughter of a blinded tilesman, who is forced to work, as a result of the blinding, as a maid in the unlikely house of Johannes Vermeer. Griet, who is assumed at the outset to be the girl in the painting, eventually turns every woman in the household against her as she becomes closer to Vermeer. After being painted, at the bidding of rich Van Ruijven, she is summarily kicked out of the house and marries butcher "Pieter the son," who had been courting her.
The story, though obviously fictional, is meant to create a life for the woman in the anonymous portrait, believed by some to be Vermeer's daughter, though his oldest daughter would have been only eleven at the time of the painting in 1666; clearly too young to be the girl in the picture. So, we must first assume that this woman is not a direct relation of Vermeer, and second, we must assume that she exists, and is not a creation of Vermeer's mind. With these contentions accepted, and with the concession that Chevalier need not write a fully believable theory in order for her novel to be enjoyable, the conclusion should still be drawn that the work is a failure. Whether she wishes to provide glimpse into the man known as Vermeer, or a work of looking at and being absorbed in imagination about art, or an obscure and flimsy seventeenth-century Dutch Romance, Chevalier can claim no victory.
Vermeer, who has eluded historians with his relatively late rise to fame (centuries later) and the little known about him and relatively few paintings (thirty-five) believed existent, could not be the ambivalent hermit which Chevalier paints. The character of Vermeer, far and away the easiest and most important character to make interesting, is a static, indifferent painter who paints the girl to please the lust of Van Ruijven and appease Griet, a maid, who refuses to sit and be in the concurrent The Concert with the same man. We are made to believe Vermeer has fallen, at least in part, for this maid, and thus cannot paint her sitting with the sleazy aristocrat. We are made also to believe Vermeer paints this portrait in secret from his jealous wife who has had it in for Griet since her arrival to clean Vermeer's studio, and that it so enrages his wife when she finds out the maid has worn her earring in the painting, that she births a sickly child a month early on the floor, in the middle of Vermeer's studio.
So, there's an elegant, rich, child-bearing wife and a maid of misfortune, hired to clean Vermeer's studio. Griet cleans the studio with precision and perfection, measuring placements of items with arms lengths and returning them to the original position. And, though it takes time for Vermeer to clarify his liking of Griet, from the beginning Griet is infatuated with Vermeer. Chevalier almost seeks to write of a Jay Gatz instead of a Johannes Vermeer; with Griet on a Gatsby-like quest to discover who the man with the palette really is.
But the Vermeer of the novel is so much less than the Vermeer of common myth and so much less worthy of a quest to discover. The novelized Vermeer refuses to defend Griet when she does his bidding and is caught; refuses to side with his wife against Griet; refuses to disobey rich patrons; and, yet, also refuses to allow Griet to be painted with the town sleaze. The negative inference is that this Vermeer cared about nothing but a perfect, finalized painting; a nice mythical view of a real man but hardly a real view of a myth. We are even treated to such pearls of (or, rather, perils to) wisdom as: "You [Catherina] and the children are not part of this world...you are not meant to be" in response to why he has never painted his wife. A weak character is Chevalier's Vermeer; a man who bares no soul and appears, really, to have none to bear. We are left, in the end, to wonder if he actually cares about anything beside his work and, if the answer is no, then we are left to wonder if the character, as written, could be so philosophical to think of separate spheres of art and life.
Chevalier's painfully strained and stretched metaphors make the novel no less easier to digest: Chevalier goes to such lengths to point them out that they are no fun and require no thought. Chevalier explains where each tip of an eight pointed star leads, and allows Griet to wonder if she's chosen the right path. A broken tile of Griet and her brother Franz, what could prove a savory metaphor in retrospect, is destroyed by Chevalier's didactic need to help the unintelligent reader by saying that the girl who broke it could never have known how true a prophecy it would become once the two siblings lose contact. Finally, a knife sent spinning to floor at the hands of Catharina in Griet's house at the beginning of the novel is referenced multiple times to keep its memory fresh before a final showdown between Catherina and Griet concludes in the same result: with the spinning knife ending with its point toward Griet. Clearly by the flat characterization, Chevalier assumes the reader will be more attracted to Griet's molestations at the hands of Van Ruijven and her time in alleys with Pieter the son than with actual style
The Verdict: For a breezy pseudo-intellectual read, Girl With a Pearl Earring is sufficient. For a real look at Vermeer, read Anthony Bailey's Vermeer: View of Delft. For a worthwhile combination of history and fiction, look elsewhere.
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