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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Chevalier's clunky first novel, initially published in England in 1997, lacks the graceful literary intimacy of her subsequent runaway hit, Girl with a Pearl Earring. In split-narrative fashion, it follows a transplanted American woman in southwestern France as she connects through dreams with her distant Huguenot ancestors. The primary plot concerns the plight of Ella Turner, an insecure American midwife of French ancestry. Her architect husband, Rick, has been transferred from California to Toulouse, France, with Ella accompanying him. Often left alone, she becomes lonely and isolated, and when she decides it's time to have a baby, she begins dreaming of medieval scenes involving a blue dress. In alternating sections of the novel, these details are developed in a narrative about a 16th-century French farm girl and midwife, Isabelle du Moulin, and her eventual marriage to overbearing tyrant Etienne Tournier. Isabelle and Etienne belong to a vehemently anti-Catholic Calvinist sect that overthrows the village's cult of the Virgin, who is also known as La Rousse and depicted in paintings as red-haired and wearing a blue dress. Because of her own red hair and midwifery practice, Isabelle is suspected by her husband of witchcraft and punished accordingly. Ella, with the help of magnetic local librarian Jean-Paul, researches the lives of Isabelle and Etienne, trying to get to the bottom of her strange dreams. Chevalier tries hard to make Ella sympathetic, but her dissatisfaction with Rick is baffling, as is her attraction to the chauvinistic Jean-Paul. Equally difficult to swallow is the heavy-handed plot, which relies on jarring coincidences as it swerves unsteadily from past to present.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From AudioFile
In Tracy Chevalier's first novel, we follow two very different women born centuries apart living in the same rural area of France. In an entertaining mix of historical fiction and detective story, Chevalier uses her proven talents to make us care deeply about the conjoined fates of seventeenth-century Isabelle du Moulin and twenty-first-century Ella Turner. Narrators Carter and Marceau Clarke both read terrifically well. They infuse their respective characters with vivid personalities and make the extra characters for which they are each responsible believable--from aged French male peasant to 10-year-old girl. As an added bonus, all the French accents are spot-on. An utterly involving listen. A.C.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
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First Sentence
She was called Isabelle, and when she was a small girl her hair changed colour in the time it takes a bird to call to its mate. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
She was called Isabelle, and when she was a small girl her hair changed colour in the time it takes a bird to call to its mate. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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