An enjoyable historical fiction novel. I was transported to Paris in the mid 1850s with the Carbonari (an Italian radical group to which Lord Byron belonged) plotting against the French Emperor, Napoleon III, in an effort to get him to back them in their attempts to release Piemonte from Austrian rule.
A doctor’s daughter from the Italian countryside, Livia and her new husband, diplomat Niccolo, arrive in Paris, sent by Conte Cavour to try to influence the French Emperor. After feeling lost for several months and desperately missing Turin, Livia finds a friend, Elizabetta, the Emperor’s mistress. Elizabetta takes Livia under her wing and introduces her to the Paris Opera and the Emperor himself. When Livia finds nightshade berries mixed with currants in Elizabetta’s kitchen, she’s not sure whether she’s foiled a plot to poison either Elizabetta or the Emperor. When Elizabetta is actually poisoned, Livia must use herbals and techniques she learned from her physician father to save her new friend’s life.
This is also a slow-burn romance between a husband and wife in their marriage of convenience. As a physician and avid gardener, I appreciated the details of botanicals, poisons, and their uses used as epigraphs before each chapter. Overall, this was an engrossing, richly-imagined historical novel about women in a man’s world, a book I hated to finish.
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