Almost Here! Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran

Publish Date: February 15th 2011

Format: Hardcover 464pp

Synopsis (From the Publisher):

"The world knows Madame Tussaud as a wax artist extraordinaire…but who was this woman and how did she become one of the most famous sculptresses of all time? In these pages, her tumultuous story comes to life as only Michelle Moran could tell it. The year is 1788, and a revolution is about to begin…

Marie Tussaud has learned the secrets of wax sculpting by working alongside her uncle in their celebrated wax museum, the Salon de Cire. From her popular model of the American Ambassador, Thomas Jefferson, to her tableau of the royal family at dinner, Marie’s museum provides Parisians with the very latest news on fashion, gossip, even politics. Her customers hail from every walk of life, and when word arrives that the royals themselves are coming to see their likenesses, Marie never dreams that the king’s sister will request her presence at Versailles as a royal tutor in wax sculpting. Yet when a letter with a gold seal is delivered to her home, Marie knows she cannot refuse—even if it means time away from her beloved Salon and her increasingly dear friend, Henri Charles.

As Marie becomes acquainted with her pupil, Princess Élisabeth, she is taken to meet both Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, who introduce her to the glamorous life at court. From lavish parties with more delicacies than she’s ever seen, to rooms filled with candles lit only once before being discarded, Marie steps into to a world entirely different from her home on the Boulevard du Temple, where people are selling their teeth in order to put food on the table.

Meanwhile, many resent the vast separation between rich and poor. In salons and cafés across Paris, people like Camille Desmoulins, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre are lashing out against the monarchy. Soon, there’s whispered talk of revolution…Will Marie be able to hold on to both the love of her life and her friendship with the royal family as France approaches civil war? And more importantly, will she be able to fulfill the demands of powerful revolutionaries who ask that she make the death masks of beheaded aristocrats, some of whom she knows?

Spanning five years from the budding revolution to the Reign of Terror,Madame Tussaud brings us into the world of an incredible heroine whose talent for wax modeling saved her life and preserved the faces of a vanished kingdom."

Video trailer for Madame Tussaud

THUGB - LYON, FRANCE

Book Review: The Secret Eleanor by Cecelia Holland

Publish Date: August 2010

Format: Paperback 368pp

Synopsis: (From the Publisher)

"Eleanor of Aquitaine seized hold of life in the 12th century in a way any modern woman would envy! 

1151: As Duchess of Aquitaine, Eleanor grew up knowing what it was to be regarded for herself and not for her husband's title. Now, as wife to Louis VII and Queen of France, she has found herself unsatisfied with reflected glory-and feeling constantly under threat, even though she outranks every woman in Paris. 

Then, standing beside her much older husband in the course of a court ceremony, Eleanor locks eyes with a man-hardly more than a boy, really- across the throne room, and knows that her world has changed irrevocably... 

He is Henry D'Anjou, eldest son of the Duke of Anjou, and he is in line, somewhat tenuously, for the British throne. She meets him in secret. She has a gift for secrecy, for she is watched like a prisoner by spies even among her own women. She is determined that Louis must set her free. Employing deception and disguise, seduction and manipulation, Eleanor is determined to find her way to power-and make her mark on history."

My Review:

Eleanor of Aquitaine is most well known for her marriage to Henry II and for being the devout mother of Richard I, but in The Secret Eleanor, Cecelia Holland focuses on Eleanor's early adulthood and her marriage to King Louis VII of France.

From the Beginning of the book, Eleanor's ambition and thirst for power is quite apparent. While holding court in Paris, Eleanor meets Henry II and is quickly besotted with him. Already dissatisfied with her marriage to Louis VII, Eleanor decides at once that, with Henry II at her side, nothing can hold her back from the power she desires. She immediately embarks upon a course of action that is sure to set her free of her current situation. Eleanor is strong and ruthless when it comes to reaching her goals, yet not even she can accomplish this feat alone; She will need the help of her sister Petra and the loyalty of those whom love her. But when the stakes are so high, can one completely trust anyone? In a story of love, ambition, power and betrayal, The Secret Eleanor will have you questioning who is right in their actions and what price is too high for power and loyalty to those you love.

Having read only one other book on Eleanor of Aquitaine, I was eager to learn more about this fascinating woman through Cecelia Holland's The Secret Eleanor. Unfortunately, I found this description of Eleanor to be lacking in depth and it was quite hard to derive any pleasing qualities from her demeanor. In the first few chapters she meets Henry II and has an intimate, and might I add cleverly descriptive, rendezvous with him; which lead me to ask: "Why? Where did that come from?". There were many times during the course of the novel I found myself pondering how their love came about. If only there would have been a bit more history between them it would have improved the plot greatly.

Although my issues with Eleanor were great, they became less prevalent as the book went on. This was mainly do to the sift in focus from Eleanor to her sister Petra, who's motives were not without reason. It was through her that everything was put into perspective and the story began to draw me in.

After the switch in focus, the plot quickly becomes more in depth and it twisted with great surprise. By the end of the book, I found myself wanting it to continue! I was not ready to leave Eleanor and Petra; it seemed their story had just begun. All things considered, this was a good read; though one that could have been better, especially in the beginning. I have another book by Cecelia Holland awaiting me on my bookshelf; I shall indeed be reading it.


FTC: I received this book from the publisher. As always, these are my own honest opinions.

Book Review & Guest Post: Claude and Camille by Stephanie Cowell

Synopsis: (From the Publisher)

"Sometimes he dreamt he held her; that he would turn in bed and she would be there. But she was gone and he was old. Nearly seventy. Only cool paint met his fingers. “Ma très chère . . .” Darkness started to fall, dimming the paintings. He felt the crumpled letter in his pocket. “I loved you so,” he said. “I never would have had it turn out as it did. You were with all of us when we began, you gave us courage. These gardens at Giverny are for you but I’m old and you’re forever young and will never see them. . . .”

In the mid-nineteenth century, a young man named Claude Monet decided that he would rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than take over his father’s nautical supplies business in a French seaside town. Against his father’s will, and with nothing but a dream and an insatiable urge to create a new style of art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he set off for Paris.

But once there he is confronted with obstacles: an art world that refused to validate his style, extreme poverty, and a war that led him away from his home and friends. But there were bright spots as well: his deep, enduring friendships with men named Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet – a group that together would come to be known as the Impressionists, and that supported each other through the difficult years. But even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a beautiful, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be by the side of the defiant painter and embrace the lively Bohemian life of their time. 

His muse, his best friend, his passionate lover, and the mother to his two children, Camille stayed with Monet—and believed in his work—even as they lived in wretched rooms, were sometimes kicked out of those, and often suffered the indignities of destitution. She comforted him during his frequent emotional torments, even when he would leave her for long periods to go off on his own to paint in the countryside.

But Camille had her own demons – secrets that Monet could never penetrate, including one that when eventually revealed would pain him so deeply that he would never fully recover from its impact. For though Camille never once stopped loving the painter with her entire being, she was not immune to the loneliness that often came with being his partner. 

A vividly-rendered portrait of both the rise of Impressionism and of the artist at the center of the movement,Claude and Camille is above all a love story of the highest romantic order."

My Review:

In this touching and in depth look into the life of Claude Monet, the reader is at once absorbed into a world of art and passion. Told from the perspective of Monet himself, we follow him from his first days as an aspiring artist, through his struggles and hardships, then into his reflective later years. After reading Claude and Camille, Monet's brilliant artwork has taken on a whole new meaning and depth. In writing this novel, Stephine Cowell has brought Monet and his art to vivid reality, and in doing so, she has also created a masterpiece of her own. 

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I am happy to announce that, as a part of her current blog tour, Stephanie has stopped by today to share with us a lovely guest post!

Tank you Stephanie for bestowing Confessions and Ramblings of a Muse in the Fog with your time and thoughts; it is a pleasure to have you here!

~The advice of a wise old scholar to a new historical novelist~

I once had a conversation with the very great Elizabethan scholar A.L. Rowse in the sunny quad of an Oxford College. He was then a mere 85 years old and I was quite in awe of him. In fact everyone was so scared of his irascible temper that they stayed away from him but he was never bad tempered with me. I had won a 10 day scholarship to live at Oxford and attend lectures there because of the Elizabethan novels I was trying to write and so we met to my great joy and awe.

I asked him timidly as we sat in the sun, “But is it ok to invent things and to make up dialogue?” And his eyebrows raised and he said fiercely, “Of course you have to make up dialogue! And scenes.”

He was also a Shakespeare scholar and I pondered these things. We have no idea if Henry V rose up before his men as they were about to storm Agincourt and cried, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’” He might have muttered to one of his captains that his shoes hurt and it looked like rain might dampen the gun powder. But for four hundred years brave Harry has lived in the minds and hearts of readers for this speech.

So of course you have to make things up and with that you may have the blessing or skepticism of readers. Fiction brings historical figures to life as no biography can do. And looking back at that conversation I had with Dr. Rowse that day and a subsequent one seated at the High Table in Jesus College’s dining hall under a picture of Elizabeth I who founded the college, I realized that while I was looking at him with awe, he was also looking at me a little wistfully because I had the gift or the tenacity to make history come to life through fiction. We each had different gifts.

Mine was complicated. Sometimes historical fiction travels over a period of many years in which thousands of scenes between the real people took place but in a book, they must be condensed to a handful, each showing the development of the characters. Which scenes? What dialogue? What history do we need? His was complicated. He spent days and days studying the buttery books from the 1580’s of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (the history of what each student bought to eat every day then, and yes they kept the hand-written accounts!) to discover what the playwright Christopher Marlowe spent on food when there. Dr. Rowse spent months poring over original documents from London circa 1600 to discover the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets.

Dr. Rowse was a good friend of his Cornish neighbor, Daphne du Maurier, and knew and loved her novels well. He knew that historical novelists are the best entry to times past for a reader. I used Dr. Rowse’s research for my first three novels. I kept writing him begging letters to his house in Cornwall to tell me more and more about my then subject. And finally he wrote back testily, “You know quite enough about these people and their times. Now write your novel!” In the last few years of life, I set one of his poems to music, sang it to the guitar and sent it to him. A small enough gift to a great man. 

Since then I have done and continue to do as my gifted colleagues do (and as he ordered me to do in his last letters written at the age of 92), to keep studying and then write my novels and bring times past between the covers of a book. I have his many letters on the English blue letter paper of the time in his scrawling handwriting. “Keep writing,” he told me. “Never never betray your gift. Let me know if you need anything more from me. Love, A.L.”

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To learn more about Stephanie and her works, you can visit her website: stephaniecowell.com

FTC: I received this book from the publisher. As always, these are my own honest opinions.

For the King by Catherine Delors: Update!

A couple months ago I announced the upcoming release of For the King, which is the newest novel by Catherine Delors. At the time of that post, there was not yet a definite synopsis but now I bring you the complete synopsis and exiting book trailer! 

Publish date: July 8th
Pre-order: barnesandnoble.com

Snopsis: (From the Publisher)

From the author of the critically acclaimed Mistress of the Revolutioncomes a spellbinding historical thriller set in post- revolutionary Paris. 

For her first novel, Mistress of the Revolution, which the Associated Press dubbed one of the "best reads of the year," Catherine Delors earned comparisons to Tracy Chevalier and Philippa Gregory. In For the King, she again demonstrates her matchless ability to illuminate key turning points in history while weaving a gripping story about a man caught between his heart and his integrity.

The Reign of Terror has ended, and Napoléon Bonaparte has seized power, but shifting political loyalties still tear apart families and lovers. On Christmas Eve 1800, a bomb explodes along Bonaparte's route, narrowly missing him but striking dozens of bystanders. Chief Inspector Roch Miquel, a young policeman with a bright future and a beautiful mistress, must arrest the assassins before they attack again. Complicating Miquel's investigation are the maneuverings of his superior, the redoubtable Fouché, the indiscretions of his own father, a former Jacobin, and two intriguing women.

Based on real events and characters and rich with historical detail, For the Kingtakes readers through the dark alleys and glittering salons of post-revolutionary Paris and is a timeless epic of love, betrayal, and redemption.
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To read more about this exciting new novel, visit Catherine Delors' website @ catherinedelors.com



(update...had a glitch with the trailer, it should be up again soon)

Gibson

Gibson was rescued by friends from a market in Hong Kong. He was in pitiful
condition, having been tied up by his tail. He is a special needs kitty who can wash his own face because his front paws turn out.

Now, four years later, he is doing fine in his new home in France. By Linda Laddin.