Review: _Versailles:_ wandering, fluffy musing on a doomed queen

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Tonight's theme continues merrily along... There seems to be an awful lot of ink spilled lately on the last queen of France, the Austrian born Marie Antoinette. Take Ms. Frasier's excellent biography on the subject, told with plenty of insight and detail, enough to show her as both architect and victim of her own fate. There's a lighter version of the same story around. Even a film -- The Affair of the Necklace. And then there's this one. Somehow, it seems that if a writer manages a really good book, there isn't an editor around that has the nerve to toss the next manuscript back and say, we're not going to touch this one. Such is the way of this one my friends. Bouncing merrily along from setting and style, shifting from viewpoint to viewpoint, told sometimes in first person or as a screenplay, it's a ghastly mishmash of a book. Characters are given names, but precious little in details. To make matters worse, the author tosses out the details of the building of Versailles by Louis XIV, the dying of Louis XV, and the events of Antoinette's own life in a haphazard style. Author Kathryn Davis barely scratches the surface of each scandal or major event, just enough to say 'this or that happened' then she's off to another gossipy tidbit. Even the big scandal that may have hastened the Revolution is treated in such a curistory fashion -- to wit, the Cardinal de Rohan, Jeanne de La Motte, and a fabulous diamond necklace -- is given less than five pages of narrative, then we shift viewpoints again, and a new bit of trouble on the horizon. Or let's take the romance that may or may not have occured between Antoinette and Count Axel von Fersen, the rumored lover of the queen, and we hardly see any passion or romance, just coy hints and sighs. Oh please. If this is what I wanted, I would have dug up a historical romance at the market and settled in for what I knew would be fluff. Instead, this is wandering, trivial, junk that's trying to disquise itself as a serious novel and what we get is a cheap veneer over plywood. When you get history that's more fabulous than anything a novelist can conjure, surely they deserve a bit more respect than this. Not at all recommended. Skip the temptation to pick up this light, small sized book, and find something that at least resembles the real thing. One star, and barely that. This is a turkey.