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Jennifer Donnelly – Revolution

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‘Let them eat cake’ did not happen here.

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 470
Type: Fiction
Age: Young Adult
ISBN: 978-1-408-80152-9
First Published: 12th October 2010
Date Reviewed: 30th April 2017
Rating: 2.5/5

Andi’s little brother, Truman, died unexpectedly a couple of years ago, and Andi is struggling to come to terms with it; it happened under her watch. Failing school and with a poor outlook on university, her father tells her she must join him on a work trip to Paris. She doesn’t want to go but Paris was the home of a historical musician she loves and her father’s friends are converting an old museum into a house; the building is full of artefacts from another time, including the diary of a girl living in 1700s Paris.

Revolution is a semi dual plot line book that looks at the horrors of the French Revolution starting from before the time of the fall of Bastille; it connects a young travelling servant’s life with a contemporary person in a not dissimilar position, one grieving her brother, the other trying to look out for a young prince. The book has a lot of promise – history in tandem with the present; the possibility of time travel that is somewhat realised – but is unfortunately plagued by very lazy writing.

Andi does not read as real. Her status in society – high – is not explored enough for you to believe it. The way she speaks does not correspond to her age. Donnelly has inserted a lot of strange non-words that heighten this – ‘parslied carrots’ – and employs the likes of the unnecessary ‘shake my head no’. Were it contained to Andi’s narrative, the laziness would not be so bad, but the 1700s Alexandrine speaks the same way, anachronisms running riot, the two girls sounding one and the same – in a literal way rather than symbolically. You could say Andi is translating it, but it still doesn’t ring true.

The information on the Revolution is the redeeming factor – this book has it in spades. The musician of Andi’s thesis may not be real (in our world) but everything surrounding him and his time is. The underground tunnels. The morbid death parties. The author’s research seeps through the pages.

In regards to the sort of time travel, it’s worth knowing that Andi is always under the influence of pills – she overdoses often – and whilst this doesn’t excuse her awful behaviour, it’s enough to wonder if she would have been such an uncaring person before. (Neither character is likeable.) The time travel concerns Andi, solely. Alexandrine’s part in the novel is limited to her diary. The diary is a bit far-fetched, with Andi reading it everywhere, including the artefacts section of a library, and not being asked about it. Her restringing of a guitar from two centuries ago using modern strings without research… thankfully this is fiction!

If you want information about the underground mausoleums in Paris, it’s worth dipping in and out of the pages, but otherwise it’s one to pass by.

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