Revolution

In modern-day Brooklyn, Andi Alpers is a gifted musician struggling with clinical depression and failing grades following the death of her younger brother. Her father takes her to Paris, where she discovers the hidden diary of Alexandrine Paradis, a girl who lived through the French Revolution and served as a companion to the doomed Louis-Charles, the young dauphin. As Andi works on her senior thesis regarding an obscure eighteenth-century composer, the narrative intertwines her current grief with Alexandrine’s eyewitness account of the Terror and the monarch’s imprisonment.

Readers with an interest in musicology and European history gravitate toward this title to see the technical intersection of classical composition and political upheaval. The book appeals to those who study the mechanics of grief and the way historical artifacts connect different eras. Musicians find value in the detailed descriptions of guitar performance and the physics of sound. The audience gains a specific understanding of the fate of the French royal family and how artistic expression serves as a method for processing personal psychological trauma.