Revolution

Here’s a revelation: I like reading about damaged people. A shocker, right? Lets face it, sunny, happy people can be a bit dull, at least in print. My current troubled soul, is Andi, a seventeen year old girl, living in modern day Brooklyn. She is very bright and a gifted musician. She is also severely depressed, due to the death of her younger brother. This is a glimpse at her state of mind: “ I don’t like hope very much. In fact I hate it. It’s the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard. It’s bad news. The worst. It’s sharp sticks and cherry bombs. When hope shows up, it’s only a matter of time until someone gets hurt.”
Her father, in a desperate move to rescue his daughter from this darkness, show more drags her to Paris for a couple of weeks, while he works on a project. They stay with family friends, one who happens to be a devotee of the French Revolution. Andi, while combing through some artifacts, stumbles upon a diary from the 18th century. It was written by Alex, another smart, talented teenager, struggling to survive the tumultuous years of the French Revolution. Andi is soon immersed in this special girl’s story and slowly begins to see some light in her own life and a road back from her grief and guilt. This very talented author has crafted a beautiful, interweaving tale, filled with history, a devotion to music,which spans the spectrum from Bach to Radiohead and all told with intelligence and wonder. Find a copy and get lost for a little while. show less

My eternal gratitude goes to the young woman at the ALA conference who convinced me to pick up this book and take it home with me. Where it shall now stay.

Andi Alpers is in Hell. Her brother is dead, her mother is insane, and she is about to be expelled from her prestigious prep school in Brooklyn. At this point, Andi really couldn't care less. The pills and her music are the only things keeping her here, but she's slipping further every day...

Until her famous geneticist father gets wind of her impending expulsion and drags her off to Paris to finish her senior thesis. Desperate to get home, Andi throws herself into her research, a project on the musical 'genetics' of Amadé Malherbeau, a 19th century French musician who composed the show more mysteriously-titled "Fireworks Concerto."

Andi just wants to get back to Brooklyn. She doesn't care about her father's controversial project: testing an ancient preserved heart that may have belonged to the son of the late Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette -- a little boy who saw his world crumble during the Revolution. But then Andi finds a beautifully-preserved guitar among the collection of artifacts. And inside the guitar case, she finds a hidden compartment with what seems to be a diary...

Trust me, this book is so much more than its plotline, although Donnelly does a flawless job of weaving two narratives together, as Andi reads the account of a girl her age during the Revolution -- Alexandrine Paradis is a street performer with aspirations to the stage, but she finds herself drawn into roles she cannot control as her countrymen tear each other to pieces. Until there is nothing left in her but the drive for one mission; this girl, who watched her world burn and her people close their eyes, becomes determined to set the skies on fire.

I loved how much of the story was interlaced with music, and its power to express when words fail us. And even though I'm not a total music nerd like Andi, she made me appreciate the complexity of the musical tradition, how musicians draw from each other and leave their legacies, so that even today a rock star can carry echoes of Beethoven in one haunting chord.

Really, this book is full of beauty as it circles around one ultimate question: Why? In a world choked with madness, cruelty, grief, fury, and despair, rolling endlessly along the iron rails of History -- why bother? Why try? Why even dare to hope?

Read this book. It may not stay with you in the same way; it may not change you or the way you see the world, even slightly.

But I doubt it.

**Like this review? Find more at The Ravenous Bookshelf: http://ravenousbookshelf.blogspot.com/ show less

I picked up Revolution on the recommendation of a friend and because it was one of LTs most read books of 2010. I should have skipped this one, however. To be fair, I tend to be leery of books that are widely publicized, as my tastes tend to lead me in other directions. But I succumbed and wanted to see what all the hoopla was about, so I began reading.

The story is straight-forward: unhappy girl tries to keep a failing family together, meets boy who changes her perspective, and finds solace in reading about the problems of a girl during the French Revolution. She becomes so engaged in the girl’s diary that she mysteriously travels back in time and tries to continue the girls mission. Of some interest is the structure of the book, show more which is divided into three sections (Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven), and the boy’s name is Virgil. Unfortunately, that is about all that I found of interest.

I thought Andi, the main character, was whiny, spoiled, and impossible to empathize with despite the tragedy that she suffered. Her 18th century counterpart, Alex, is more likable, though self-centered and ambitious to a fault, which is overcome through her impossible relationship with the royal family. In addition to the unlikeable characters and impossible situations, the author, in an attempt to capture the lingo of adolescent love, comes out with drivel such as this:

I hear him in his songs. His dreams and his fears. His braggedy-ass rapper’s schtick. His kindness and anger. I hear his soul in his songs, and I could listen to the sound of it all night. Chapter 33

Puh-lease.

Enough said. I would recommend avoiding at all costs. show less

Andi, a brilliant high school senior at a prestigious private high school in New York City, is grieving the loss of her younger brother two years ago. Her depression is deepened by the fact that her father is no longer around and her mother has fallen off the deep end. The only thing keeping her going, besides her antidepressants, is her music. Andi is a gifted guitarist who uses her music to express the grief she can't express in words. However, she's about to get expelled from school due to her failing grades and she's taking more and more pills just to get through the day.

When Andi's father pops back into her life, she's whisked off to Paris against her will. As she works on the school project that she hopes will convince her father show more to let her go back to New York early, she becomes involved with the mystery of what happened to Louis Charles, the dauphin who may or may not have died following the beheading of his parents, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and of Alex, a girl who lived during the French Revolution and had a special tie to the young prince. When Alex's world becomes all too real for her, Andi must decide if this cruel, messy, unforgiving life is worth the pain and heartache we all eventually endure.

I'll admit, I didn't have high hopes for "Revolution." It came up as a read-alike for Lauren Willig's "The Orchid Affair," which I adored, but I usually find YA historical fiction too dumbed down for my liking. Such was not the case. As with all truly good historical fiction, I feel like I learned a lot. I feel like I could speak with someone about the French Revolution and not come off sounding like a total idiot, which was not the case before I read this book. Plus, I loved the story. The book was very well written. Jennifer Donnelly is a gifted storyteller. Even though she was macabre and jaded and surely not pleasant to be around, I liked Andi. By the time she got to Paris, I felt like I knew her.

The book has flaws. The first part, before Andi goes to Paris, drags on way too long. Andi's depressed to the point of being suicidal. Okay, we get that. It doesn't need go on for nearly 20 chapters before moving the plot along. However, it didn't get boring, so that's forgivable. Also, the narrator who reads for Alex (I'm assuming this was Emma Bering), has a horrible French accent. She sounds much more like she's affecting a Caribbean accent than a French accent. It was difficult to get past, but as the book went on and I got more invested in the story, that, too, became forgivable.

The one unforgivable sin, the one which prevented me from giving the book five stars, was the fact that the author never successfully addressed the language issue. Andi is an American. She has a French mother, but she is an American with an American accent. I'll buy that perhaps she is conversationally fluent in French, although I don't recall this ever being addressed in the book (and I was actively listening for it). However, either the author is trying to convince us that Parisians automatically assume that Andi is American and converse with her, and each other, in English, or she's trying to convince us that Andi's French is so perfect that she can translate, with no assistance, poems with a very complicated vocabulary AND that her accent and vocabulary is so good that it could fool native speakers into believing that she's French. Only at one point is the language issue address, and that's in the last third of the book when she's calling after the boys in the catacombs to wait up for her. She mentions that she yells out in French. Perhaps I noticed this error in logic more because I was listening to the book instead of reading it, but at times it made it difficult for me to enjoy the story as a whole. show less

Andi just wants to dull the pain, so she's been cutting classes and prescribing herself a little extra of the drugs that her psychiatrist has her taking. Her mother is wrapped up in her own pain, painting portraits of Truman, Andi's brother, who is dead. Her father never takes much of an interest in her life, but when Andi is in danger of getting expelled from her super-expensive prep school, he takes her to Paris while he performs DNA research on a heart from the time of the French Revolution.

I'm glad I'd been warned ahead of time that Andi is a tough character to like, or I probably would have given up on this book even before my regular 50-page rule. She is pricklier than Mary Lennox and definitely has a rougher mouth, but once she show more goes to Paris the plot really takes off. The second storyline told through a girl's diary from during the Revolution was compelling, and I did start to warm up to Andi once I understood a little more about why she was so sad and angry. I was fascinated by the historical and musical references throughout the book, and was really glad to see a thorough list of information and books to go to next in the back. Though one decision towards the end of the book threw me for a loop, I would readily recommend it to teens and adults, whether they think they'd be interested in the French Revolution or not. show less

Summary: Since the tragic death of your younger brother in an accident two years ago, Andi Alpers has not been doing well. She's failing out of school, estranged from her father, taking care of her mother, and spiraling into a deep depression that drugs are no longer able to ameliorate. The only thing that is able to distract her is her music, and even that doesn't always take the edge off her grief and pain. At the end of the fall semester, her geneticist father takes her to visit friends in Paris, where he's been summoned to help solve a mystery that dates from the French Revolution. While she's there, she stumbles across a diary from that same time period - that of a young girl named Alex, a puppeteer, actress, and one-time companion show more to the Dauphin of France. Instead of working on her senior thesis, like she's supposed to, Andi becomes more and more involved with the story the diary has to tell. She's struck by the similarities between Alex's life and her own... but although she hopes for a happy ending for Alex that she's been denied for herself, she has no idea just how closely their stories are intertwined.

Review: Phenomenal. I was initially a little bit disappointed that Donnelly's newest book was a YA book rather than another of her Roses books - I liked The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose better than her other YA novel, A Northern Light. That disappointment, however, was very short-lived; this book was simply wonderful.

Revolution pulled me in right away and didn't let me go until the very end - and really, not even then. I picked it up in the evening, thinking that I'd get maybe fifty pages in before calling it a night, and then I proceeded to stay up obscenely late, lost in its pages. (Of course, I was also battling a wicked case of post-trans-Pacific-travel jet lag, so the fact that I was up late probably wasn't entirely the book's fault, but it certainly didn't help, either.) Even after I finally went to bed and got up again, all I wanted to do was read; enough so that I finished the entire thing in less than 24 hours. And I'm still thinking about it, even days after I've finished it.

Because seriously, this book has everything. It's got history, it's got a mysterious diary, it's got music, it's got the French Revolution, it's got some truly amazing writing about the way that real people deal with grief and loss and depression and suicide, it's got the Paris catacombs, it's got hope and snark in equal measures, it's got a fair bit of romance and the slightest touch of ghost story, it's got family drama, it's got intertwining past and present storylines (love those!). It's got an ambiguous and unresolved part of the ending that feels authentic, instead of like the author didn't want to commit to a plot choice. It's powerful and moving without ever losing the authenticity of a seventeen-year-old's voice. It's got interesting and sympathetic characters and not one but two crazily compelling storylines. It's great.

In fact, there are only two even slightly negative things I can say about it. First is the issue of context: some of the diary entries are too full of expository detail to feel authentic, although since Alex states that she's writing for posterity, I suppose we can let that slide. Similarly, it's written in first-person present tense, which was usually innocuous but occasionally made me wonder if Andi was narrating all of the action to herself. Secondly, I've got a bone to pick with Donnelly about her portrayal of Andi's father. Not all of us biologists are such humorless, joyless, imagination-free buzzkills; not even the geneticists.

Scientist-bashing aside, though, I loved it. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: Definitely recommended for those who like modern young adult novels, historical fiction involving the French Revolution, Donnelly's writing, and really good books. show less

There are books that you want to read forever, ones where you want to live in the world of the authors creation. Others that show you a world that is already around you. One where you hear the author's voice follow you, whispering in your ear. I have touched music, I'm a clarinetist but it was a chore, I even dabbled in writing music but that was an experiment. This book made music real, I see it floating around me: showing more then I could ever imagine. I read this book cried, read more and cried again. I see Andi's brother and feel her her heartbreak, I look at my family and see what I have. This was my first Jennifer Donnelly book and I can't wait to read northern lights. My life changed, please read this book