Tracy Chevalier scored a bestseller with her 2000 novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, set in the Dutch city of Delft in the 1660s. Her heroine, Griet, is a teenager who enters the household of the painter Jan Vermeer as a maid and finds herself embroiled in a situation that nearly ruins her reputation, but results in one of the artist's most stunning visual images. Critics praised Chevalier for her evocation of seventeenth-century Holland through the eyes of an illiterate servant, a young woman with very few options and few possessions save for a capacity for backbreaking work and a good reputation. As she answered an Authors and Artists for Young Adults (AAYA) query about themes in her work, Chevalier reflected that fiction seemed to be guided by what she called "Otherness--how people cope with being the outsider, taking on new values and ways of life. I also seem...