Goddess should have had everything I enjoy in books: an ahead-of-her-time, gender-swapping heroine with the swordsmanship of a musketeer and the voice of a La Scala operatic superstar. Despite her mind-boggling skills, fascinating life, and flamboyant lifestyle, I barely made it through this book. This quasi-biography of Julie d’Aubigny (AKA Mademoiselle la Maupain), who lived in seventeenth-century France, falls flat—though it was well-researched.
Raised by a single father, who trained Louis XIV’s (the Sun King’s) musketeers, Julie surpasses her peers in swordsmanship and stamina. By age thirteen, she is the mistress of the king’s Master of Horse, the much-older Comte d’Armagnac. By sixteen she falls in love with a girl who is packed off to a convent when their relationship is discovered. Julie breaks her love interest, Clara, out of the convent and is on the run, eventually sentenced to death for her crimes. She survives, is pardoned by the King, and goes on to become a star of the Paris Opera.
In sections labeled with terms from the stage (Recitative, Duet, Minuet, Ensemble), the story is told in first person (Recitative) as Julie tells her story to a nameless, faceless, voiceless monk who is purportedly writing her story as much as offering her solace—and possibly final rites— during her final days when she has retreated to a convent to die at age thirty-three. In other sections, the story is told in omniscient point-of-view and fleshes out her life. However, since in the Recitative sections, Julie has already given details of the chapter that follows, I found it repetitious to re-read those same details in the sections that follow. Additionally, there is so much glorification of Julie by herself in the Recitative sections and by literally everyone else in the other sections, that there is little room for anything else. The book could have benefitted from fewer Recitative parts. Perhaps trimming some of those over-the-top accolades would have left room for increased characterization of every other character, the vast majority of whom are written in broad, superficial terms without depth.
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Goddess (HarperCollins, June 1, 2014) is available through:
Your local independent bookseller | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
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