• Fiction. By Tracy Chevalier. Dutton, $24.95.Grade: C+

Plot in a nutshell: London, 1792, is a frightening and awesome city for the Kellaway family, migrants from a hamlet in Devonshire. Settling in the suburb of Lambeth to pursue the trade of chair crafting, the family meets rogues and circus-folk, city slickers and an odd but nonetheless appealing neighboring printer and poet, the real-life William Blake.

The two Kellaway children, Maisie and Jem, are befriended by Maggie, a streetwise urchin and learn the excitements and dangers of the city's taverns and alleys. They also struggle with the fears and curiosities that mark the border between childhood and adulthood. Their adventures climax in an effort to defend Blake from the depredations of a gang of royalist patriots bent on rooting out supposed sympathizers of the French Revolution.

Sample of prose: Maisie Kellaway's first view of a London pub: "Maisie had never been in a room with so many lamps, and was fascinated by the detail she could now make out - the pattern on women's dresses, the wrinkles on a man's brow, the names and initials carved into the wood panels. She watched people passing to and fro much as a cat might spy on a tree full of birds - hungrily following one, then being distracted by another, her head whipping back and forth."

Pros: As in her earlier, well-received novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, Chevalier shows a fine ability to depict the images and the spirit of a past age, as demonstrated above.

Cons: Though William Blake is intended as the central focus of the novel, he is upstaged by the courtship story of Maggie and Jem Kellaway. By using the story of their maturation as the creative nucleus of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Chevalier attempts her Pearl device of depicting an artistic genius through the eyes of those living around him. But in this case, the result is too great a distance between creator and subject, and Blake never fully comes alive.

Final word: Although not an effective portrait of the artist, as we might have expected, the manners and costumes are evocative, and the tale has the appeal of a timeless story of adolescence.