From Publishers Weekly
Davis (Walking Tour) takes liberties with the legend of Marie Antoinette in this novelization of the doomed queen's life, narrated as a series of sketches told mainly from Antoinette's point of view. As Davis imagines it, Antoinette is a bawdy, clever, forthright young woman interested above all in her own pleasures; she and her bumbling husband, Louis XVI, are guilty of little more than enjoying their courtly privileges. Davis has a light touch, and she sometimes wryly acknowledges questions of historical veracity that the novel inevitably raises. Recalling a conversation with Axel, a member of the Swedish court and object of her affection, Antoinette says, "Of course these may not have been our exact words, though they're close enough, at least in spirit." A few pages later, in case the reader gets any ideas about consulting an encyclopedia: "Nor does it matter, really, if Axel was my lover, in the physical sense at least.... It matters to historians, most of them men. It matters to gossips, most of them women. The pleasure is in the speculation.... Were we sexually intimate? What difference could it possibly make to you?" Such playful self-reflexivity is woven through accounts of historic events and personages, among them Madame Du Barry, Mirabeau and the story of the imprisonment and execution of the king and queen. Davis's Antoinette a wit and a flirt is bewitching, and the book is an alternately funny and melancholy meditation on the passage of time and the vagaries of history.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Davis (The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf) offers a short but poignant meditation on the life of Marie Antoinette and the role of fate in our lives. Much has been written about that queen, but this novel is unique, using Versailles and its Hall of Mirrors as much more than just a building and a room. Versailles was built to reflect the glory and power of Louis XIV, but by the end of the 18th century it had become a cocoon sheltering its inhabitants in a beautiful but artificial world. At the age of 14, Marie leaves her Austrian homeland to join her fiance, the eventual Louis XVI. Never quite at home in France and never really accepted by her subjects, she finds solace in Versailles itself. She flits from room to room, from circumstance to circumstance, unaware of the symbol she has become until it is too late. The portrait that emerges is of a woman hemmed in by fate and her own na‹vet‚, who has her faults but who is nonetheless courageous and devoted to her family. Told from Marie's perspective, this is a refreshing change of pace from the typical historical novel and is highly recommended to all public and most academic libraries. David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
