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Book Review of Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette

Abundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette
DLeahL avatar reviewed on + 48 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


This is a very well written biographical novel of Marie Antoinette. It begins with her birth and early childhood and continues on until the bitter end. Do not let the fluffy, shallow movie deter you from this novel - it IS a gripping read, but doesn't NEED any "updates" to make her life fascinating.

Marie Antoinette, over her life, developed from a Grand Duchess who was rigorously trained by her matriarchal mother to a naive princess plunged into the degenerate, political Court of Versailles. Her early schooling in dance allowed her to perfect the famous "Versailles glide" - a manner of walking in which the women of the Court appeared to glide around the palace with no trace of footsteps.

When she and her husband inherited the crown at a young age, they were intelligent and wise enough to know that they had been given an incredibly weighty responsibility. A woman ahead of her time, M.A. learned to rise above her mother's verbally abusive letters, her husband's ineffectuality in every sphere (including the bedroom) and the self-indulgent hedonism in which the French nobility lived - sublimely indifferent to the incredible poverty of the people they ruled.

Unfortunately for M.A., this was too little too late - and she and her family were destined to suffer the punishment which had been cumulating as a result of generations of misrule.