Length: 432 Pages
Genres: Historical Fiction
Rating: 5 out of 5 Stars
A special thanks to NetGalley and Berkley for providing me with an ARC of this book!
Trigger Warnings in this book for Racism, Slavery, Violence, Death, Gore, Mentions of Torture, Racial Slurs, and a Graphic Birth Scene
"By the age of eighteen, Sylvie de Rosiers has mastered fractions."
[...] On the French colony of Saint-Domingue, fractions were not innocuous numbers separated by a line of dark ink (though she knew those, too). Here, fractions had faces. M*latto, qu*adroon, oct*roon--these terms divided the blood into halves and quarters and eighths, black and white and whiter still."
Sylvie de Rosiers has lived her whole life on her white father's coffee plantation in Saint-Domingue. She is beloved by her father and one of her brothers, Gaspard, reviled by the other and tolerated by her father's wife. As much as her father loves her, has pampered her and given her everything she wants, she knows she does not fit in, amongst her white siblings or the slaves that they own. It is an existence she feels she must accept--until the rebellion started by Vincent Ogé, a Creole aristocrat, ends in his ghastly execution, one that her elder brother insists she sees. The man is put upon the wheel and broken, and it is this act that wakes the revolutionary hidden in Sylvie's heart.
The masters thought it would end the rebellion to kill the voice of it--they thought wrong. As Saint-Domingue burns, plantation after plantation taken over by slaves, Sylvie and her brother escape, fleeing to France in the hopes of peace. But France is in the middle of its own revolution, headed by the icy Maximilien Robespierre. Here, Sylvie will find education as a rebel of France, and fall into a soul-consuming love, not only for Robespierre, but for his mistress, Cornélie Duplay. And as we know, history is not kind to revolutionaries.
I loved this book, and some of that is the amazing writing, the time-period, etc., but most of it is because of the protagonist, who starts off as being almost unlikeable but always understandable, and develops so well over the book into a woman who is not afraid to challenge the status quo. Sivak does something that is so hard as a writer--lets her character be full of faults, and slowly, so slowly we hardly notice it, lets her develop into someone we want to succeed over everything, and love. Revolutionary France comes to vivid life in Mademoiselle Revolution, and I loved every one of the little details that were put in, so obviously well-researched! And of course, loved seeing so many historical figures: Danton! Napoleon and Josephine! Marat and his killer, Charlotte Corday!
This book is a contender for one of my favorites of the year, and I can't wait for everyone to get their hands on it and experience Sylvie de Rosiers--revolutionary, woman, sister, and Rhea Silvia!
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