Marie Antoinette herself comes across as a charming, sincere, yet vain and hedonistic woman who really had no idea what life was like for her subjects. I felt that I never really got to the core of the person, this felt like a overview of the French Queen rather than a real person’s story.Written with vivid detail on fashion, clothing, and the day-to-day ceremony that the King and Queen lived their lives with, one certainly understood the distance the monarchy had placed between themselves and the French people. Read moreĪbundance, A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund to me was like the French Court at that time, lavish, opulent and rich but yet out-of-touch, shallow and frivolous. With penetrating insight and with wondrous narrative skill, Sena Jeter Naslund offers an intimate, fresh, heartbreaking, and dramatic reimagining of this truly compelling woman that goes far beyond popular myth-and she makes a bygone time of tumultuous change as real to us as the one we are living in now.

The young queen, once beloved by the common folk, becomes a target of scorn, cruelty, and hatred as she, the court's nobles, and the rest of the royal family are caught up in the nightmarish violence of a murderous time called 'the Terror.' Deeply disappointed and isolated in her own intimate circle, and apart from the social life of the court, she allows herself to remain ignorant of the country's growing economic and political crises, even as poor harvests, bitter winters, war debts, and poverty precipitate rebellion and revenge. She shows her new husband nothing but love and encouragement, though he repeatedly fails to consummate their marriage and in so doing is unable to give what she and the people of France desire most: a child and an heir to the throne. Coming of age in the most public of arenas-eager to be a good wife and strong queen-she warmly embraces her adopted nation and its citizens. Marie Antoinette was a child of fourteen when her mother, the Empress of Austria, arranged for her to leave her family and her country to become the wife of the fifteen-year-old Dauphin, the future King of France.

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