A story that tugs at your heartstrings is a rare and beautiful thing. A story that leaves you with a feeling that your still-beating heart has been cleaved from your chest and left between the pages of a book as you slide the back flap closed and drift back into reality is even rarer. That’s what I’m experiencing right now.
The Crimson Thread, Kate Forsyth
This marks the first time I’ve ever been able to buy one of Kate Forsyth’s books from a North American publisher and I could’ve cried tears of joy when I saw The Crimson Thread on the shelf in my local bookstore. I fell in love with Forsyth’s writing with Bitter Greens when I was 16, but her books were never available in Canada. I’ve always relied on my Australian relatives to bring them halfway around the world for me, until now…
The Crimson Thread is a retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, set during the occupation of Crete during the Second World War. This is one of those books where 90 percent of it is building up to something much bigger, and then everything happens all at once, much like a spool of thread unravelling. It takes a special kind of writer to hold their reader’s attention that long, but Kate is such a beautiful writer, there’s no way I would’ve put the book down before finding out what she had in store. Kate could write my organic chemistry text and I’d read it from cover to cover and enjoy every minute of it.
Every sentence is thoughtful and flows off the tongue like poetry. It’s heavy on symbolism, and the grit and heroism of the Greek resistance carry a powerful message about courage. Alenka, a young Greek woman, is the beautiful princess Ariadne. Her monstrous bastard half-brother, fathered by a German archeologist, is the minotaur. Alenka hates and fears him, yet, she mourns for him because he shares her flesh and blood. And then there’s an Australian soldier as Theseus—the entitled hero who betrays the princess who led him to the bullish brute in the labyrinth with her spool of red thread.
An Indiscreet Princess, Georgie Blalock
If one thing is for certain, it’s that Georgie Blalock has a thing for royal rebels. I got a taste of the rigid protocols of the London Season in The Last Debutantes earlier this year, and this time Blalock turns her attention to the stultifying Victorian Era.
This is not the Queen Victoria of the Jenna Coleman variety. This is Queen Victoria who, seven years after the death of her beloved husband Alfred, is still deep in mourning and determined to drag her children into the inky black depths of despair with her. Princess Louise is a rebel. A blossoming sculptor studying under Joseph Edgar Boehme at the National Art Training School, she makes her mother regret her actions every time she drags her feisty daughter away from her lessons to fulfill royal duties.
This is a novel that pits a headstrong mother and daughter against each other. Princess Louise breaks free of the court’s constraints to surround herself with bohemians and embarks on a clandestine affair that sees her banished to the icy fringes of the British Empire, only to come roaring back to challenge her mother. While Louise’s unconventional lifestyle was a draw, the writing was ultimately as stiff and formal as the period.
Antoinette’s Sister, Diana Giovinazzo
Before Marie Antoinette went to France to marry the Dauphin, her elder sister also journeyed far from home to marry the King of Naples. This is Maria Carolina Charlotte’s story.
I’ve never been one for fiction that condenses an entire lifetime’s worth of events into 350 pages, which is what Antoinette’s Sister does. However, Charlotte’s character growth held me fast from beginning to end. She starts out as a petulant child, vehemently opposed to her mother’s will. She becomes a force to be reckoned with when her husband fails to fulfill his duties as monarch, rules Naples with an iron fist, and grows into a bitter, paranoid old woman after the French execute her beloved sister.
Giovinazzo’s story is thoughtful and gripping, but the language was too modern for the time period. I’m glad Charlotte is getting her comeuppance after all these years. Charlotte appears again in Kate Heartfield’s The Embroidered Book as Antoinette’s sister and rival in a duel of court politics and black magic that plunges Europe into revolution. It’s next on my list, and between these two authors, I’m excited to see how they bring Charlotte to life in their respective ways.