Author(s): Gita Trelease

Teenagers | Claire's Book Talkers

Paris is a labryinth of twisted streets filled with beggars and thieves, revolutionaries and magicians. Camille Durbonne is one of them. She wishes she weren't...

When smallpox kills her parents, Camille must find a way to provide for her younger sister while managing her volatile brother. Relying on magic, Camille painstakingly transforms scraps of metal into money to buy food and medicine they need. But when the coins won't hold their shape and her brother disappears with the family's savings, Camille pursues a richer, more dangerous mark: the glittering court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Using dark magic forbidden by her mother, Camille transforms herself into a baroness and is swept up into life at the Palace of Versailles, where aristocrats both fear and hunger for magic. As she struggles to reconcile her resentment of the rich with the allure of glamour and excess, Camille meets a handsome younge inventor, and begins to believe that love and liberty may both be possible.

But magic has its costs, and soon Camille loses control of her secrets. And when revolution erupts, Camille must choose - love or loyalty, democracy or aristocracy, reality of magic - before Paris burns.

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW - CLAIRE

In the Paris of 1789, revolution is simmering beneath the surface and violence threatens to erupt at any moment. Amidst the city’s grimy tangle of streets, Camille and her sister are struggling to survive both grief and poverty in the wake of their parents’ death from smallpox. As their brother’s gambling plunges them deeper into debt and desperation, Camille resorts to the dangerous practice of magic to transform herself into an aristocrat and gain access to the glittering courts of Versailles. Entranced by the world of boundless wealth she discovers, it becomes increasingly difficult for Camille to distinguish between her true self and life in disguise; her threads of deception weaving an ever more complicated pattern, until she is no safer behind the palace walls than in the streets beyond.