Becoming Marie Antoinette by Juliet Grey

About the novel... "Much has been written about Marie Antoinette, whose ascent to power-and steep downfall during the French Revolution― is legendary. But in BECOMING MARIE ANTOINETTE: A Novel, (Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Original; August 8, 2011), author Juliet Grey, who has written numerous nonfiction books about European royalty under the name Leslie Carroll, offers a fresh perspective on Marie Antoinette's young life, a topic mostly overlooked by historians until now. In this elegant and entertaining novel, Grey looks beyond the crown to the sacrifices a young, spoiled girl was compelled to make before she could become the queen of France who would leave an indelible mark on history.
In 1766, 10-year-old Austrian archduchess Maria Antonia learned that she would one day marry the heir to the throne of France, its dauphin Louis Auguste. Raised alongside her numerous siblings at the hands of the powerful and politically ambitious Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Maria Antonia underwent a startling makeover before leaving her homeland at the age of fourteen to marry the awkward teenage boy who would one day become king of France.. This grueling transformation included wearing sharp and painful corrective braces on her teeth (in the eighteenth century!), four-hour hairstyling sessions, and lessons in perfecting the Versailles Glide, the elegant mode of traversing the magnificent halls of the French palace. These historically accurate details bring this remarkable, often rocky and emotionally arduous coming-of-age story to fresh and vivid life.
Grey said Marie Antoinette's "young life was a long series of hurdles. She sailed over a few of them with grace and equanimity. But some she stumbled over." Amongst vivid scene in the Austrian imperial court in Vienna and the gilded splendor and manicured gardens of Versailles, we learn that Maria Antonia's relationships with everyone from her cold ambitious mother to her awkward teenage husband, were fraught with a dramatic tension all their own.
BECOMING MARIE ANTOINETTE is the first in a trilogy that will span the life of the reckless, powerful, and beautiful queen Marie Antoinette*

I'm a little ashamed to say that I know very little about Marie Antoinette's life before she became Queen. We all know her infamous quotes (be they true or historically exaggerated... we'll never know for sure) as well as her ultimate fate in the chaos that defined the French Revolution.

Becoming Marie Antoinette is such a well-written story of how a young Austrian Royal became Queen of France. Even though it is the first in a trilogy, it could be read as a stand-alone... not that one would want to miss out on the rest of the story. This is a hallmark of a great story-teller. Ms. Grey has crafted a story that almost made me forget how it will eventually end and take pleasure in Maria Antonia's young life.

I loved the descriptive writing that Ms. Grey used to set the scenes. It painted just the right atmosphere, shaping it and then moving into the heart of the scene. I have given up on authors who take forever to get to the "meat". Ms. Grey knows the delicate balance that most readers (including me!) crave.

I look forward to the sequels... following not only Maria Antonia's ultimately tragic journey to becoming one of history's most intriguing queens, Marie Antoinette, but her "everyday" life as a wife, mother and friend. Not everyone can relate to being a queen but, I think, we can all relate to the ordinary relationships that made her so interesting that we want to read about her more than three hundred years after her death.

~Thanks to Ashley Gratz-Collier, Publicist at Random House Publishing Group as well as Juliet Grey for sending me a copy of Becoming Marie Antoinette in exchange for my fair and thoughtful review.~