Actual rating: 4.5/5

The Embroidered Book is a magical, captivating book re-imagining a key period in European history and focussing on two pretty remarkable sisters.

Charlotte and Antoine are daughters of the Habsburg Empress and they have always known that their lives would be spent in service of their mother’s wishes to strengthen their empire. Still, when they find an embroidered book containing mysterious spells, they spend their childhood growing closer and closer together as they try to unveil its secrets.

Time passes quickly and very soon they will be sent away from home to marry complete strangers: Charlotte will go to Naples to marry a hard and cruel man; while Antoine is destined to France, where she will have to shed all traces of her Austrian origins, including her name. In the lavish mirrored corridors of Versailles, she is renamed Marie Antoinette.

Very soon, the two sisters find that the book and its spells are the only way for them to take control of their lives. But all magic comes at a price and, as sisterly love slowly turns to rivalry, all of Europe may have to pay it in blood.

I really enjoyed this book from start to finish! The late 1700s are a fascinating historical period in their own right and become absolutely irresistible when paired with magic and a focus on women’s lives and experiences.

Charlotte and Antoinette were wonderful characters to read about. They’re complex, flawed women who are trying hard to carve out some space and power for themselves in a world where they are seen as little more than ornaments and whose primary purpose is producing an heir for their powerful husbands. The magic system was fascinating and very clearly explained and coherently maintained throughout. Nothing is free, as every spell requires a sacrifice: the bigger the spell, the higher the sacrifice.

Seeing the two sisters adopt competing approaches to the use of magic was incredibly interesting. While Charlotte joins a secret brotherhood that advocates keeping the use of magic restricted to a select few, Antoinette forms her own inner circle with the goal of ultimately making magic accessible to all. Both approaches have their flaws, and treachery abounds on both sides as certain individuals pursue their own individual power over everything else. Watching it all slowly unfold into the big historical events we all know (and knowing where the road would end for some of the characters) was extremely satisfying, even if painful as I grew attached to these characters more and more.

My only problem with this was that, even though I was mostly glued to the pages, certain sections (especially towards the middle) felt slightly too slow-paced and dragged a bit for me. This isn’t necessarily unexpected in a book as long as this, but it was just a bit too much for my taste. Still, it more than made up for it in the rest! Definitely a must-read for historical fantasy lovers.


I received an e-arc of this book from the publisher via NetGalley as part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Tours. This did not affect my opinion of the book in any way. ( )

I was thrilled that this novel won the 2023 Aurora (Canadian sci-fi and fantasy) Best Novel award. It's a historical fantasy novel that explores the lives of Marie Antoinette and her sister Charlotte, Queen of Naples and Sicily. This novel mostly follows the real events surrounding these two regents, but imagines that they have the ability to cast magical spells. In Heartfield's story, this ability explains the motivations behind their actions. I've read several of Kate Heartfield's novels earlier and I loved them all. ( )

Another unnecessarily long read. In fact, by the last 200 pages, I was actually annoyed with how overblown this novel is, because a shorter page count would have served the story better and also because I knew if I even tried to read another book at the same time, I would never have finished such a bloated fictionalised textbook.

The French Revolution and Marie Antoinette are two of my pet historical subjects and I have read many books, fact and fiction, on both. I therefore mistakenly imagined that a book about MA and her sister Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, albeit with the currently trendy trope of magic thrown in for good measure, would be a pleasure to read. The length of the book, clocking in at nearly 700 pages, was a concern, after recovering from a similarly stretched out novel, but I ploughed on. And on. And on.

The first few chapters, before Charlotte and Antoine's sister Josepha dies and the sisters are married off to Ferdinand of Naples and the Dauphin of France respectively, were deceptively light and entertaining, with the sisters discovering magic in a hidden book of spells belonging to their murdered governess. I usually hate fantasy novels and can't understand the obsession with adding Potter-esque magic to standard historical fiction, but the hidden world of magisters, both official and 'rogue', works well as a metaphor for the French Revolution (the underground Order of 1326, run by noble men, is determined to keep magic from the masses, against the 'rogue' magisters who want to bring power to the people). I also liked Charlotte, Antoine's older sister, who really did rule Naples in the place of her sybaritic husband.

However, magic aside, this is simply a Wikipedia timeline of historical events and personalities made fictional with modern dialogue and attitudes, which might have worked well at half the length but instead stretches and droops like overworked dough. Marie Antoinette is all good intentions and betrayals, plus an unconvincing love affair with Fersen, of course (they first shag in a field close to Versailles, because obviously the Queen would behave like that and nobody would have noticed). And poor Charlotte's actual achievements, including social reforms and the building of a navy, are lost to magic spells and sacrifices of memory and affection: 'Perhaps he would think that all her success was down to magic, to mere trickery. And perhaps he would be right.' Plus, the many, many historical cameos are completely random, like the Montgolfier Brothers, Emma Hart and her interpretive dance, the Chevalier/Chevaliere D'Eon, a transgender soldier and spy, and Jeanne de la Motte, whose attempt to set up Marie Antoinette for her own gain is here bizarrely attributed to one of the Queen's friends in a rambling subplot. There are also clunky sections of exposition where author's frenzied research is shoehorned into the story regardless of character or plot. The author's notes on Goodreads are redundant because the reader can easily tell the difference between history and her version of events.

Did read; still too long. I have another novel about Maria Carolina - Antoinette's Sister - on my wishlist, which I'm hoping will be both shorter and a better tribute! ( )

Pros: fascinating period, clever interweaving of magic into history, interesting characters and events

Cons:

After finding their murdered governess’s book of magic, archduchesses Maria Carolina (Charlotte) and Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette) start teaching themselves spells. They hope this forbidden skill will help them in their upcoming political marriages to King Ferdinand I of Naples and the Dauphin of France respectively. One joins forces with a magical society that wants to control the use of magic, while the other is forced to hide her skill and work with rogues. Dreaming of how they’ll change the world for the better, politics, magic, and the whims of fate propel the sisters into the arms of revolution and a world very different from what they’d hoped to create.

Carefully following the events of history from 1767 to 1798, the author weaves magic into the story, using it to often explain natural disasters, political upheaval, and personal triumphs and defeats in the womens’ lives.

Magic requires 5 sacrifices, including a personal treasure, a memory, and an emotion (the love of a pet, for example). These sacrifices slowly leach the life and vivacity from the girls and the other practitioners around them. Magic itself varies between simple frivolous spells and truly dangerous spells.

It’s sad seeing how circumstances gradually change the sisters’ relationship with each other. Each one tries to do the best for their country, their family, and themselves, but that ultimately causes discord between them.

The author is kinder to Marie Antoinette and her actions and motivations than history has been. I didn’t know much about Naples or Charlotte’s reign, so I found her part of the story utterly fascinating. It’s clear the author did a lot of research on the people and time.

If you like alternate history and fantasy, this is an enjoyable read. ( )

Intimate, devastating, enlightening--this unique literary-feeling historical fantasy covers decades in the lives of two sisters, Charlotte and Antoinette, who were raised to be married and rule alongside their husbands. Antoinette, we all know something about--she becomes Marie-Antoinette, who in our history loses her head in the Revolution. Heartfield's retelling of history draws on facts (her highlighted notes on Goodreads are a fantastic read, once your own reading of the book is done) but is brightened by a deep exploration of magic, its power, its sacrifices, its role in the turbulence that shook Europe and the world through that period. This book is alt history at its finest. ( )