Review: Madame Tussaud...by Michelle Moran

Being "back" in graduate school has driven home one key reality for me: I will not be reading as many "fun" books as I did last year.  I'm glad that I shortened my reading goal to fifty new (to me) books in 2012, rather than the 100 I did in 2011.  There is no way I'd be able to complete an average of two books a week right now, especially when I'm doing so much reading for my classes.  Don't worry; I promise not to review a book I read for class unless it's really stellar.  That being said, here's (probably) my last "fun" read until further notice: Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution by Michelle Moran.

Madame Tussaud, the sculpture of an elderly woman who greets customers at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London, takes on the form of practical, ambitious Marie Grosholtz, a woman in her mid-twenties in pre-Revolutionary France, making a living off her uncanny ability to create exact wax portraits of people.  After an introduction to the royal family, Marie is invited to work as a tutor to the king's sister, Princesse Elisabeth, in Versailles, where she makes friends and finds herself sympathetic to the royals.  But when the Revolution breaks over France, Marie is forced to choose between loyalty and life, ambition and love.

I feel like I would have gotten through this book a lot faster if I hadn't had four days' worth of homework to do.  It is a relatively quick read, and I did enjoy it as a work of fiction.  I'm glad that Moran added the tagline "a novel of the French Revolution", because there are major historical inaccuracies present, especially around the relationship between Marie and her supposed beau, Henri Charles.  

My other bone to pick with this book is the "tell, not show" policy that Moran utilizes in this story, and that is, I've found, a major problem with writing historical fiction from the POV of a female character who was largely relegated to the outskirts of the political arena.  Most of the book is Marie's reaction to political events that she finds out about through newspapers, friends, or relatives -- she was not an eyewitness to most of it.  While I applaud Moran's decision to not take liberties with history, it doesn't make for particularly exciting literature.  One GR's critic said she wished that she had read more eyewitness descriptions, rather than breathless retellings from people who happened in on Marie in her workshop.  This was a problem I had with The Tudor Rose by Margaret Campbell Barnes.  Barnes set out to write the story of Elizabeth of York, wife of Henry VII and mother of Henry VIII of England, and while she did a great job of "telling" the history of what happened, she was hampered by the simple fact that Elizabeth was little more than a spectator at most of the great events that happened in her lifetime.  That is the problem that Moran also runs into with Madame Tussaud.

Overall, I enjoyed it for what it is: a re-telling of the events of the French Revolution through the eyes of one of its spectators, but not one of its main contributors.

Rating: ****