“When I was alive, I lived in a time of beautiful men. After I died, I found myself in a time of beautiful women.”

Blanca is dead. She is also in love. With a living woman. Who is in love with a living man. In fact, both the living humans are stellar artists, the woman being the great writer George Sand and the man being the great composer Frederic Chopin. Blanca is a ghost, but she still has feelings. In fact, she doesn’t care that these two are famous, but there’s something in the masculine image of Sand that has caught her in the writer’s grasp. There is little Blanca can do, but she can observe --- and observe she does. Lucky for us.

"It’s the women who drive the narrative, who tell the stories we really care about... Stevens has written an enjoyable and moving novel about the nature of life on this planet."

As the ghost haunting the Charterhouse, the secret lair where the artistic lovers meet, Blanca knows the overgrown spots well. In 1473, at the tender age of 14, she dies here in Mallorca. Four centuries later, Sand, her two children and Chopin show up. When they come to the little village, Blanca is a funny, nutty, helpful, love-hungry ghost watching over the denizens of the place. What she doesn’t realize is that, although she sees the beauty in their strange life, Sand and Chopin are not as welcome in town, and the prevailing provincial attitudes threaten to rock the artists’ world in a terrifying way. Blanca can only love from afar and watch over them, taking her eternal time to reflect on her untimely death and the love for a young monk that complicated her life on the planet.

Creativity and love. Two of our most vaunted subjects. And, for her debut novel, Nell Stevens has put the two of them in contact in a way that will create a fun buzz for fiction readers of all kinds --- with a little historical information built in and, of course, plenty of romance. Her attention to detail, as expressed by the erudite Blanca, makes BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE full of emotional resonance that befits our confusing and still wondrous world.

Of course, George Sand, Frederic Chopin and their unconventional love has been writ large in the annals of storytelling for centuries. But having a character who does the loving and observing of this famous couple gives us a chance to sit beside her and enjoy the story from the best seat in the house. As delightful as Blanca is, Sand and Chopin seem ridiculously real to 21st-century readers. It’s a ploy that gives us a wonderful new read on these two fantastic renegades.

With all the publication fervor over books about mother characters, it is interesting to get the perspective of Sand’s relationship with her own children. They are not exactly thrilled with her exploits and bring a very contemporary response to the things that have made her such a fantastical figure in literature and social history.

Many of the chapters are named after the work that Chopin is doing at this time, but he turns out to be the least interesting character here. It’s the women who drive the narrative, who tell the stories we really care about, who carry us through the history and the drudgery of everyday life in that tiny Mallorcan village the same as if it were in small-town America today.

Stevens has written an enjoyable and moving novel about the nature of life on this planet. As opposed to climate change and warfare, it is nice to read a story where we can still recognize the clime, where the basic responses of human emotion are real to us even in our advanced society. BRIEFLY, A DELICIOUS LIFE is highly recommended.