Tsundoku reviewed Cake Eater by Allyson Dahlin
I'm Sorry Sir, I did not Mean To Do it...
5 étoiles
Content warning This is Marie Antoinette's life, so it's "Historical Fact + Robots" and talking about the differences
This is a YA SFF retelling of Marie Antoinette's Life until the Revolution / Reign of Terror Starts.
I cannot call my myself a Maria Antonia expert, because other than listening to Dana Schwartz cover her in the podcast Noble Blood (or the guest episodes on You're Wrong About) I haven't studied her heavily, beyond having listened to these episodes multiple times.
But if you listen to those episodes, you get the impression: Marie Antoinette's biggest crime was being Marie Antoinette. Like "The Affair of the Diamond Necklace" (does not occur in this book) but that's basically "Marie Antoinette says no to buying a hideously expensive necklace. Priest she hates gets catfished into thinking she's both in love with him and needs him to buy the necklace, despite the mountains of evidence Marie Antoinette did nothing wrong in this scam case, the general public believes it's a false flag operation because She TOTALLY Wanted the necklace." (I could go into more detail but just listen to Noble Blood)
Like to be clear, the revolution is more condensed in this book, and ends before she has any children (so you don't have to focus on THOSE Heartbreaking details of her life. I want to stress if you decide to look up those details there's a Major Bummer Warning / Fucked up Shit warning there)
There's changes of course. Louis is Asexual in this telling (that makes a lot of sense tbh) and instead of the mechanics of locks and keys he is more obsessed with programming / hacker shit (though I don't think he ever says "I'm in", sorry) her Sister-in-Law Elizabeth (who I know nothing about to be honest) has a relationship with a woman.
Marie Antoinette does not like Madame du Barry but there's no scandal for failing to acknowledge her, though I thought it was building towards one.
Maria Antonia's Dog, Mops is in the book.
There's some interesting implications that I hope get dug into with some sort of sequel, that a lot of these popular figures (Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, etc) existed in the past, but unless I missed it (and I may have, there were parts of this book where I was a sobbing mess) it didn't go anywhere with it.
Anyway, an excellent debut, I'd really love to see more from this author.