the many lives & secret sorrows of Jospehine B.

Sandra Gulland's first person narrative of Josephine Bonaparte's early life is a delight. She makes you believe this is history without bogging down in explanations -- even if she has to resort to a footnote now and then! That's talent. And courage. I've never read a better account of how people both weathered and were snuffed out by the Terror: part of the new regime one day and awaiting execution the next. But for all the intensity of the drama, Rose Beauharnais (later Josephine B.) is candid and matter of fact about her sorrows. A very good read. Probably its best success, technically, is how skillfully the author makes it possible for us to like Rose despite her association with people who have a lot of blood on their hands, by means of her limited view and the danger that threatens her. A sense of reality and period unfolds in details like her bad teeth, and the ambiguity of her unhappy marriage that makes the death of her husband both tragedy and relief.