The miniaturist is the debut novel of Jessie Burton. It tells the story of Nella Oortmans as composed by Jessie Burton. Jessie made the story up after seeing the cabinet house in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The story takes place from mid-October 1686 until mid-January 1687
The novel starts with a prologue telling about a funeral at the 14 of January 1687. In the rest of the novel you come to know, how and why the deceased passed away and what happened to the people who loved the deceased.

The main story start with part one which takes place in mid-October 1686 at the House of Johannes Brandt situated at the Golden Bend part of the Herengracht. The eighteen year old Petronella Oortmans comes to her new house after she married Johannes a thirty-nine year old merchant just a month ago.

She is not so pleasantly surprised to find that Johannes did not bother to be there when she arrives. Yet as she is now married she has to make this house her home and the people in it her family. Which proves hard to do as Johannes, Marin (his sister) , Cornelia and Otto (the maid and the male-servant) are very closed off to others. It seems the don’t want her here. But why did he marry her then and why did he gave her a cabinet (a miniature version of the house) which is very expensive?

The story becomes even more complex after she orders some miniatures to places in the cabinet. She asks for some but start to receiving more than she asks for from the miniaturist. Why is that and how on earth does the miniaturist know so much about the people who live in the house? Nella is intrigued as well as spooked by it. What does she have to do?

When reading this novel it is clear that Jessie Burton did a lot of research to make the story as historically accurate as possible. She certainly succeeded in that, but it also made it hard to grasp the story because for a good forty pages the story does not come to life.

This can have many reasons one of them might be that the world she is describing is not so familiar to us. The second reason is the use of many Dutch words which even by the Dutch may not always been understood (there is a glossary at the end but it takes the speed out of the story.) The third reason is the very closed off nature of many off the characters which makes it hard to get used to them and know where the story will go. And for those whose first language is not English it might have to do whit that.

But as the story unfolds it intrigues you and you want to read further until you finally know how it ends. Or as Marin uses to say many times throughout the story ‘t can verkeeren.

Jessie Burton has delivered a very good debut novel and hopefully she has more stories to tell in the future!