Thank you very much, I will try to find that book.

Just go to the "books" section of this site.

"Abundance" by Sena Jeter Naslund is also very good.

Abundance was good. I liked how the relationship between Louis, Axel and Marie Antoinette was described as a balance, not nesscarily an affair but a mutual friendship, if it was an affair, Naslund described it very subtly unlike Erickson. I suppose you can say I like subtly.

I know, I quite liked that about the book. Naslund has an interview on YouTube and she said that she presented it as a friendship and really nothing more and she supports Frasier's theories.

I understand that some people like to read "novels" and "fiction" - but to seriously discuss them as anything but what they are? A novel by definition is "an invented prose narrative that is usually long and complex and deals with human experience through a connected sequence of events." INVENTED being the operative word. Fiction, also defined as "something invented by the imagination or feigned." (both from Webster's dictionary) Again, INVENTED being the operative word. Carolly Erickson clearly states under the title of this book that it is a novel. I have not read this book, but I glanced at it - I do not read novels and fiction. They give you exactly what they claim to, invented situations and events.

Yes, Lilly, but in historical fiction the author should not misrepresent actual historical persons by making them do and say things that would have been out of character. It is irresponsible since it misleads too many people about the historical reality. It is disrespectful of the real Marie-Antoinette to use her name to make money in a pulp fiction romance.

My point is.... that people should not be reading fiction or novels (historical or not) and believing that what is contained therein to be truth or fact.
It is a story, made up by the author (even if some of the facts may be true). It is more irresponsible of the reader to take this stuff seriously - than the writer, who tells you their work is fiction or a novel. Once you know this, you have been warned the work is not accurate. "Novel" and "Fiction" give an author free license to write whatever they want and what they should or "shoud not" do becomes subjective to the writer. I do not agree with the misconceptions that fiction and novels leave people with - hence why I do not read them. I find authors who write biographies much more irresponsible when they are claiming to write history accurately, then make unproven and unsourced claims, such as Joan Haslip's outright claim the MA and Fersen WERE lovers (only one example). Unfortunately, making those pulp fiction romances does make money - because people buy them!! Why?

I totally agree~ some biographies are really novels with a few footnotes!

Isn't that the truth!

Ah ha, so glad to have found this thread! This book has just been recommended to me.

And when I say "recommended" to me, I mean that it briefly mended the rift between individuals of Jacobin and Royalist sympathy. These political ideologies have been quarreling over the principles of government and the the definition of tyranny for some two-hundred years but they put aside their differences to tell me to steer clear of this novel when I asked about it. The former group expressed concerned for my health should I skim its unholy pages. The specific concerns of the royalists I have yet to record, but I have been assured that they will elaborate when they have finished shrieking.

So I'm going to be reading it, if for no other reason than to join in the chorus of lamentation.