Here’s a historical fantasy book review from my backlog of reviews previously published in HNR. While we hunker down to avoid the plague, you may be reaching for a good book for entertainment. This one, Enchantée (Amazon affiliate link), was declared “Best Book of the Year” by NPR. (I certainly enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I’d go quite that far.) The French Revolution gets an infusion of charming, atmospheric magic.
I’m currently reading Trelease’s follow up book, Everything That Burns, so it seems like a good time to share my book review of the first in the series. This review appeared in the February 2019 Historical Novels Review issue. I notice that the series has been retitled and this book now has the title All That Glitters, although both titles appear on Amazon and elsewhere.
Book Review Enchantée
Set in 1789 in Paris and Versailles, Enchantée mixes the French revolution, a well-developed female main character, and magic to charm readers in this historical fantasy. She places her reader in the known historical world—quite vividly from the perspectives of both aristocrats and the poor. Yet, this familiar court of Marie Antoinette, of the storming of the Bastille, of carriages and gowns, fabulous hats and ludicrous royal diversions has a new, sinister thread running through it: magic, that can be accessed only through collecting sorrow and worse.
Trelease does a good job making this fantastical element believable and exciting. She uses rich language to bring alive this world that is exists a few degrees away from reality. Early on in the novel, Camille, the twenty-one year old woman whose dangerous tip into poverty and despair motivates the plot, meets an unusual boy in the most unusual of circumstances. She saves him from plunging to his death by grabbing hold of the gondola of his hot air balloon. This brand-new method of flight—dangerous and experimental—becomes a metaphor for the novel’s theme of rising to new heights, as a society, an individual, a dreamer.
Trelease describes this crucial boy thus, “But what was most striking about him was that his whole face was animated with a kind of light that made him the most alive thing in the landscape, as if an artist, sketching out the scene, had used a gray pencil to draw everything except one figure, on which he’d lavished his richest paints.” This skillful writing combines with an enjoyable plot and love story to make a highly recommended read.
(For another recent book of historical fiction set in French history, The Women of Chateau Lafayette.)