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Die Französische Braut Roman (2010)

by Clare Clark(Favorite Author)

2.99 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

3455402402 (ISBN13: 9783455402407)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Hoffmann und Campe

review 1: French Louisiana in 1704 was a vast, mostly unexplored wilderness, with fewer than 200 colonists living there. Clark's book really gives a vivid and realistic picture of the environment settlers of Mobile and New Orleans faced: constant sickness, with hordes of insects, rats, and alligators, substandard housing, bad government, Indian attacks. The novel follows the lives of several characters, including Elisabeth, one of the "casket brides" sent out from France to marry a colonist; Auguste, a cabin boy forced to live among the savages to learn their language and report on their activities; and Jean-Claude, a bold adventurer and soldier, whom they both love. Oddly enough, although I could never get very involved with any of the characters, I found this a good read because o... moref the setting and time period.
review 2: This novel was just about average. I loved how the author conveyed the ideals of French Louisiana (New Acadia) in this book. Her novelized illustrations were very robust and she transferred scenes very well in her book. Her research was masterful but as other authors have pointed out as I will that all novelists need to have the eyes of a historian and a soul of a writer otherwise you will lose your non-historian audience when writing a story.Character development needed some work in the book, it was too murky and too hard to follow through in the book. Guichard, Babelon, and Savaret were excellent template characters' for French colonial motifs for manhood, womanhood, and youthfulness. But I liked what other commentators have said too about the characters, just because dark energy, submissiveness, and naivety are parts of characters; development will show both the virtues and vices of both of these and in many cases we just saw the dark spots and not the lighted ones. The plot had potential to be much better than it was. Guichard's lust and power-mongering to have Elisabeth as his companion could have been more evil and more demonstrated. She failed to paint a sex canvass that most readers, especially those Anglophiles in the Francophone world love to read passionately was muffed badly. The sex in the novel was very dry and complicated to read and sex in the real world is juicy and simple and as such Mrs. Clark is bequested to paint us this canvass. She splits the novel up in two in a fifteen year time span after the death of Babelon where we see a new primary character emerge in the novel named Vicente, who was hard to follow and integrate into the story in a smooth way. The interbreeding portion between the various native Louisianans and French colonials could have been demonstrated better, because it is perhaps the greatest story in the history of North America. Her grace in touching womanly topics such as pregnancy, miscarriages, and trying to be a lady in the wilderness are very much demonstrated well in the novel. And how a woman wrote the characterization of a man was not done very well but it was decent. The themes of the novel were good but also needed work such as trans-acculturation, hardship, love and sex, and treachery were somewhat expanded upon but this and plot development go hand in hand and as such needed serious work. Treachery does not need to be ultra-mysterious to be painted in the cloak of evil and the author needs to understand that. Louisiana was a place of firsts and new themes of the French-speaking world made a commencement there extraordinarily but the author failed to explain that. On a personal side note, I disliked how the author used what we call as French-speakers, "franglaisisms" in her novel all the time. Don't pull a Dora's backpack when writing a novel set in a foreign part of the world that is mysterious to the Anglosphere. Freud once said himself that a cigar was just a cigar and this is no different. All in all, a decent novel and it shall be a joy to translate this for French readers under my pen, but it needed much work to be Hugonian, Sartrian, or Vianian at all. less

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