CBR17 Bingo: Black – Behold, the cover.
Though her tragic sister Marie Antoinette is better known today, Maria Carolina Charlotte, the queen of Naples, ruled with better success but faced her own share of troubles and tribulations in her years on the throne.
The thing with historical fiction is that the story can live or die by the events it’s based on, especially when it follows the life of a historical figure. Luckily, Charlotte is an interesting main character. Though her attitudes toward the monarchy and her family were fairly typical for the time, combining it with her sense of duty, her pride, and her love of her adopted country made for a dynamic protagonist.
I thought the writer did an excellent job of showing Charlotte as both a public and a private figure, the queen and the woman both. She had been brought up to put her country first, but she struggles with how it impacts the lives of her and her family. It was interesting too to learn about the external views on the French Revolution, and clearly laid out the lead up to the Napoleonic Wars in more detail than I’d previously known – so I learned something! I also enjoyed how the author depicted the complex relationships that Charlotte had with her husband Ferdinand and her prime minister John Action, which could have been so easily smoothed out into a cliched love triangle.
However, I did think the latter end of the book lagged, especially in the years after Marie Antoinette’s death. There’s a number of time skips, and one rather loses track of time and of what’s going on. I would have like to see more of Charlotte’s descent. I also really which there was a historical note or something which completed the arc of Ferdinand’s reign and Marie Louise’s marriage to Napoleon, because as it stands we end very abruptly, a pity when every life has threads which go on after death. As it stands I had to look up both on Wikipedia.
I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Marisa Calin. I thought she did not only a good job with all the accents, but also with capturing Charlotte’s haughty, spirited voice.