Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day are all public holidays in Finland. As I also took Dec. 23rd off I've been enjoying a nice four day Christmas break here. I spent the 23rd rather tightly with a book, namely Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly. I just could not put the book down!

Revolution is a story of two girls, two centuries apart. Andi  Alpers is a brilliant, but deeply troubled and emotionally scarred teenager from Brooklyn.

    "I wish I could stop messing up but I don't know how. What is it that mends broken people? Jesus? Chocolate? New shoes? I wish someone could tell me. I wish I had an answer. Once I asked Nathan what the answer was. I thought he might know, considering all he's been through, but he told me I would have to find it for myself. That everybody has to.
     I reach into my bag, take out my bottle of Qwellify and gobble three. That's my answer. Take enough Qwells and I forget the anger and the sadness. I even forget the question." [p. 136]

Andi reluctantly accompanies her Nobel Prize winner, DNA scientist father to Paris for the winter break. Her father, together with his historian friend G, is doing some tests on a heart said to be the heart of Louis-Charles, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. G is also planning on opening a museum and among the artefacts he has gathered at his place Andi finds a journal of a young girl, Alexandrine, written in 1795 and depicting the girl's life from 1789 onwards.

    "Liberty. The marchers had shouted it over and over again, all night long. They'd carried banners with the word writ large. Was this liberty? If so, I wanted no part of it. I was free now, yes. Free to pin silly cockades to my hat. Free to sing daft songs. Free to go back to Paris and starve.
     On the palace steps, a man mopped up blood. Two more swept up pieces of glass. The jagged shards made an ugly music as they were dumped into a bucket.
     I heard the tune and knew it - it was the sound of my dreams shattering." [p. 208]

Revolution is a well-written, gripping, heartbreaking, wonderful novel. It is contemporary. It is historical -and it is something else. :) I had a hunch of how the story would develop. Then I thought my hunch was wrong and felt actually quite happy with it. In the end I was right (and happy with that, too), but you just have to read the book yourself to know more. :) Just three more words: loss, music, love.

This was the first Jennifer Donnelly book I read. It will certainly not be the last.

Below is a picture of me my Dad took with his phone on Christmas Eve. :)