Chateau Mirabelle enchants Madeleine with its startling beauty, but it is a place of dark and haunting secrets. As the Revolution gathers momentum and the passions of the populace are enflamed, Madeleine must take control of her own destiny and unravel events of the past in order to secure a chance of future happiness.
Comment: It's November already, more than half way through it, before we know it it's Christmas and the new year... it is true what people say, time does fly as you get older...
Anyway, this month's theme for the TBR Challenge was a stimulating one, I'd think. The idea was for us to choose a beautiful cover or an horrid one. I debated this quite a lot because as people say, beauty is the eye of the beholder and even more so regarding books if one bears in mind the content might match - or not - the beauty of the cover.
Nevertheless, I went with a beautiful cover this time. I like the cover of this book because the colors almost give the sense of peace and the image is a landscape, a preference of mine when it comes to covers.Besides, the UK Piatkus label always puts an effort to crate beautiful covers and this time, it seemed to work out well.
In this book we have the story of Madeleine Moreau, a young woman who lives and works in her parents academy for girls in the France right after the revolution. This means, times are hard for those who don't seem to agree with what the revolution d demands, even if that means some people are wrongly accused or are innocents who defend more peaceful actions.
After a random but fatal attempt to defend Madeleine and a recent friend of hers, Madeleine's parents eventually die and she sees herself alone in the world save for some unknown relatives in France.
Then Madeleine and another friend go for France, to try to find Madeleine's family, along with the help of a french nobleman who has been helping some of his friends cross the border before the revolution kills them. But France is dangerous for everyone, including those who only observe...
Since this was a beautiful cover and this was a type of story I'd be interesting in reading, the combination of the two made me anticipate certain details, certain happenings which never happened in the novel. This means, not always the gorgeous covers bring gorgeous stories and there are some things I'd definitely change to make it more interesting for me.
The first thing that annoyed me to no end in this book was the fact this is 1st person narrator. I think it's a matter of real talent for an author to create such an amazing character that one just can't help to love see things though their eyes (Ilona Andrews does it perfectly!) but if not the story can become a little boring and irritating.
Madeleine isn't a bad character and I must confess some of her opinions match some of my own but she just wasn't an amazing character to follow. I'd have preferred to have third person, I'm certain the reader would be able to reach a lot more information and emotion that way.
The plot of this book isn't complicated, basically a woman looking for her roots and this could be romantic enough, considering the help provided by the dashing french nobleman that goes along and with whom Madeleine makes a connection. But this is a very mild romance, perhaps clean is a good description? I guess this wouldn't matter if the historical content was stronger but I didn't get that vibe: the action is set in a very problematic moment, filled with despair and the ignorance of people and that rarely made for a eager reading on my part. It looked like as if the author wanted to stress out these facts as the key for the emotion in the story but I don't think it achieved that.
Like I said, the romance was barely there, then there's an annoying case of a love triangle which irritated me and lots of misuse of secondary characters. So sad about the narrator, I bet the richness of the plot and the characters would have shined more if the reader had been privy to everyone's movements differently. Also, some character behavior portrayed wasn't not par to the rest of the historical content, so it made for a very inconsistent read.
There are some secrets that supposedly are meant to be the key of some things but at some point they get to be so...silly and so poorly presented that not even the little good details made up for it.
I think this book could have been a lot better and, according to other reader's opinions, it was not as good as some other books by the author. Since I cannot know that because this is the first book I'm reading by this author I'll have to just imagine so.
This was not a bad book but some writing choices seem obviously lacking, for my taste of course. Here is the proof the cover can be beautiful but the content not so much or not as much as. I still liked to give this story a chance but I expected a stronger novel, yes.
Grade: 6/10
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