TTT Book Review: Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly

The Lucky-one-and-only (Loo) and I had the great fortune of reading Jennifer Donnelly’s new book, Revolution, before its October 2010 release.  We literally fought over it; neither of us was able to put it down.  If you have not yet had the pleasure of being introduced to this wonderful book, allow us to do it now.  And let us encourage you, as well, to add it to this holiday season’s gift list for all your YA readers. 

Revolution is a TTT five-star-out-of-five must-read!

A dear friend and publishing exec gave us the book with good reason:

• it is thematically linked to the French Revolution, a topic I have been immersed in for years now with my own soon to be launched StoryApp, Beware Madame la Guillotine; and

• the main character, Andi Alpers, comes from our original stomping grounds, Brooklyn, NY, and “finds” herself…guess where…in Paris, kinda like Loo. 

So we cracked the book without hesitation, but Revolution turned out to be so much more than a superficial attraction!  It is a page-turning story of an otherwise privileged, intellectually gifted, and musically talented teenage girl who experiences the tragic loss of her younger brother and subsequent dissolution of her family.  And as if that weren’t bad enough, she blames herself for it all!  On the edge, failing school, unable to make sense of her imperfect world, Andi escapes into her music, playing her guitar until her fingers bleed.

Dauphin Louis Charles of France, third child and second son of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette of France. KUCHARSKY ou Couaski, Alexander (1741-1819).Suddenly, her estranged father swoops in and forces her onto a plane to Paris – the last place she wants to be.  He is heading there as part of an international scientific team to verify the identity, through DNA analysis, of the alleged heart of King Louis XVII.  This boy-King, who never had a chance to rule, died during the French Revolution at the age of 10, a prisoner of the mob, held in torturous solitary confinement in the Temple Fortress.  Although Andi does her best to shut her father out, creating a wall between the two of them with her music, she cannot help but be fascinated by the legend of this wretched would-be king.  Could it really be that his heart was cut out of his body, smuggled out the prison, and preserved these 200+ years? 

Before her father can solve the mystery of the heart’s identity through raw science, however, Andi discovers the truth herself.  In an antique guitar case with a faulty lock that responds to her junk-sale key on a red ribbon, she stumbles upon a never-before-read diary written two centuries before by a girl her own age.  The crumbling pages reveal Alexandrine’s courageous actions to help keep hope alive in the young boy’s still beating heart while also, inadvertently, contributing to his demise.  The harrowing tale literally draws Andi in and the two girls become inextricably linked as Andi faces her grief over her brother’s untimely end, discovers that love can and does endure even beyond death’s door, and learns to forgive. 

Grounded in sound historical research and ornamented throughout with musical accompaniment and theory, Revolution also contains all the elements of great story telling: an unpredictable multi-layered plot, compelling characters who you care about, and vivid writing on such universal themes as love, loss, forgiveness and redemption.  It expertly “depicts the eternal struggles of the human heart”, as promised on the book jacket, and for this reason, Loo and I believe, Revolution will endure on bookshelves for years to come!

Bravo, Jennifer!