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4.5 stars

Someone once told me that people tend to like tragedy more than happily ever after stories because it is more realistic. That got me thinking Was it true? Are we really satisfied when a book or a story ends in tragedy? When the guy doesn't get the girl or when things end in the worst possible way. Think about Shakespeare. He is more famous for his classics like Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear than his As you like it, All is well that ends well and many of his other plays were the good defeats evil and the characters have a happy ending. When a book is happy it will not stay with you and torture you for the rest of your life. It gives you fleeting moments of happiness and just fades away into some dark recess of your mind. Tragedy makes you think about what could have gone differently? Tragedy makes you hope, believe that things could have gone differently only if ......

So it would come as no surprise that this book which is centred around a very disturbed young women set in a very tragic time in history aka the French revolution managed to impress me. View point is a very curious thing. When you are a lowly clergy you look upon the nobility with their vainness and vanity, as the most despicable, heartless and cruel human beings that has ever walked this earth. Those who dab themselves in perfume and eat out of a silver platter while your family has barely enough to survive, no one could blame them if you decide to rise up. When you are royalty on the other hand, born and raised like one is it surprising that your viewpoint cannot go beyond the four walls that surround you. Are you to be blamed for the way you were raised and for getting the things others don't get. In this book you have a character who is on the verge of ending her life because of a tragedy she could not prevent. She blames herself on the basis of all the "if only's" that she can think of and wish for a different outcome every day. This very same young woman discovers a diary left behind by a girl roughly her same age who lived and died in the year 1795 in the middle of the French revolution which contains details of her acts of defiance for one small child, she loved more than anything whom revolution marked as a pariah and condemned to a tragic death. The child is non other than the Lost King of France Louie X VII and the diary gives an insiders account of the French Revolution from the point of view of the King and his family. See them not as the monarchs that brought about the downfall of France but as a family trying to stay alive and together. Louis-Charles as an innocent 8 year old boy who was born in the wrong family, at the wrong time. Can you fault any of them for there actions? Is their no end to the revolution? Does characters like Robespierre, Hitler, Napoleon or Mussolini bring about revolutions or is it people like us? These are some of the questions raised by the 17 year old girl who keeps an account of her life so that someone would some day find it and see the revolution for what it is and these are the very same questions that lead a 21st century young girl to follow the same path.

The level of details and the historical research put forth by the author is outstanding and the bibliography is a testament to the effort put in. I have always liked Jennifer Donnelly's characterisation and writing style. She goes into elaborate details about the world she creates keeping monotony at bay and with just enough material to transport you to that time. Being a fiction book if you ask me to describe it in one word I would say realistic. Not the story itself because there are things in there that seem way to convenient and some that would never happen in the real world but the premise itself is what I like to call realistic, the French Revolution background with the severed heads and the guillotine, the streets and gutters of Paris overflowing with blood, the orphans in the street and women pressing their handkerchiefs to the necks of guillotined victims to make souvenirs, all make for a gruesome and realistic picture of this world which is very hard to get out of your mind. Highly informative and remarkably written this book is one keeper that will earn a spot in your bookshelf.