Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly

Reviewed by Jennifer

Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

Ratings Explanation

Language: Prevalent swearing and profanity as well as 2 F-words. Vulgar words like slut, whore and piss also used throughout.

Violence: Mobs attack Versaille and the Tuileries Palace where the King and his family are living. A severed head is paraded about on a stick. A guard hits Alex on the cheek with his fist. She is hit with a poker. She smashes a lantern into a man’s head and kicks another. Alex is struck a staggering blow, then a man rips her clothes off. She is afraid of what he will do to her, but he scrubs her roughly, cuts her hair and gives her clothes to put on. She is beaten for lying. Thousands die by the guillotine. There is a step-by-step description of how this is accomplished, but it is not described each time someone is beheaded. The streets run with blood and people watch and cheer at the guillotine. The catacombs are filled with bodies from the massacres, some missing more than a head. A young boy is imprisoned, starved and driven mad through his isolation and horrific living conditions. A young boy is hit by a car and killed.

Sexual Content: There isn’t any “live action” sex going on in the book, but there is innuendo and some sexual language (horndog, dick box, wiener cousins). Today there are no kisses on the cheek anymore, it’s either “hook up or shut up.” References to high school kids sleeping around. Kids making out at a party. Boobs, breasts, and bosoms mentioned and seen. A man puts his hand on his wife’s breast. A stable boy got a maid with child. Orleans needs a boy who “thinks with his big head, not his little one.” A man drops a coin down a girl’s pants and attempts to retrieve it. A handful of kisses.

Adult Themes: High school students drink and do drugs before school because they need a buzz to face all the expectations there. Andi is on anti-depressants and regularly takes more than she should, which makes her numb and also makes her hallucinate at times. Andi’s family is very dysfunctional and they do not deal well with the death of Truman, Andi’s brother. After his death, her parents separate. Her father has a live-in, pregnant girlfriend and is almost completely absent from Andi’s life. Her mother enters a mental hospital. Andi struggles with suicidal tendencies and comes close to ending her life on a few occasions. She is failing out of school and fights with her father about her future.

Alex’s sister is pregnant and not married. The French royalty live in opulence while the common people starve. Alex steals to survive. Robespierre and other leaders of the revolution are blood thirsty and power hungry. Their ideals of equality and liberty do not apply to all. As power changes hands, different groups of people are in and out of favor. People watch and cheer at the guillotine, but the ones who are jeering today are the ones who were weeping a few weeks ago, they should know better, but they don’t. Humanity is brutal.

Synopsis

Andi is a high school senior at a prestigious private school in Brooklyn, but she is in danger of flunking out. Although she is a brilliant student and musician, she just can’t get a handle on the grief and guilt surrounding her younger brother’s death. She blames herself, and assumes that her parents blame her too, so she escapes with meds, and  her music. But sometimes, even her music isn’t enough to stop the pain.

When her famous geneticist father catches wind of her unsatisfactory grades, he forces her to go to Paris with him on a business trip so she can research her senior thesis and still stand some chance of graduating. Her father has been asked to verify the DNA of a preserved human heart suspected to be that of Louis-Charles, the lost son of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. While staying with her father’s friends, Andi discovers the hidden diary of Alex Paradis, a young actor during the French Revolution. Alex is the companion of young Louis-Charles and spends her days entertaining the last Dauphin. We experience the French Revolution through Alex’s life with the royal family by day, and her seedier, common life at night. Alex originally has only her own interests at heart, wanting merely to keep food in her empty belly, but as she comes to genuinely adore Louis-Charles, her motivation to stay alive changes and she willingly risks her life for him.

Andi is captivated by Alex’s story of the Revolution and feels drawn into the journal as if Alex needs her to complete some unfinished business. But that’s impossible, right? Alex has been dead for over 200 years. What could the Revolution have to do with Andi?

I had a hard time enjoying this book at first because of Andi’s dark and tortured character. But by the end of the book I liked the story and the intertwining of the French Revolution and Andi’s personal revolution. Although Andi is struggling, Donnelly still manages to show a witty side to her, which is a welcome tension breaker as there is a lot of heavy material here, both in the present and past. Donnelly works in a few lessons that history should have taught us by now, but that we still struggle to put into practice. Without actually coming out and saying it, she addresses how we treat each other as humans, and how, because everyone has suffered in one way or another, we should be more sympathetic to the suffering of others. The world doesn’t stop for tragedy, but do we stop to notice the tragedies going on around us?

Revolution is a Young Adult novel with content that may be difficult for some teens. Publishers Weekly suggests ages 14 and up, but this is too young in my opinion. I would suggest an age of at least 16 while taking maturity and experience into account.