Reviewer Conny Withay:Operating her own business in office management since 1991, Conny is an avid reader and volunteers with the elderly playing her designed The Write Word Game. A cum laude graduate with a degree in art living in the Pacific Northwest, she is married with two sons, two daughters-in-law, and three grandchildren.
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Author: Liza Perrat
Publisher: Triskele Books
ISBN: 978-2-9541681-3-4
Follow Here To Purchase Spirit of Lost Angels
Author: Liza Perrat
Publisher: Triskele Books
ISBN: 978-2-9541681-3-4
The saying “don’t
judge a book by its cover” has a different meaning when it comes to
Liza Perrat’s debut novel, Spirit of Lost Angels, which is about
peasants and poverty in France in the late eighteenth century.
This
three hundred and sixty seven page paperback book has a photograph of
a young women’s neckline wearing a silver angel pendant on a
leather cord with a farmhouse and field in the back ground on the
front cover. The back cover has three innocuous paragraphs about the
contents of the book. With a few punctuation errors, there were
intentional misspellings, no doubt to mimic the writing style of the
era. Due to profanity, explicit sexual and violent scenes along with
mature topics, this book would not be recommended to a young teen or
naïve adult.
Perrat writes of Victoire’s life as a poor
young woman in a village in France that covers a twenty six year
period in the late seventeen hundreds. Within the first few chapters,
Victoire’s father is killed by a nobleman who runs him over with
his carriage, her twin siblings die in their house fire, and her
mother is bound and thrown into a river for supposed witchcraft and
denying God so Victoire is sent to the big city to be a domestic
servant at a rich man’s house.
After Victoire is raped by the rich man, she is pregnant and gives up her baby girl to survive. To get out of the dire situation, she weds an older gentleman back at her village but she is in love with her childhood friend who is her husband’s son. When her own husband dies and she becomes destitute, she supposedly kills her own twins by drowning them and is committed to an asylum where she becomes Jeanne’s lover, an unscrupulous woman who has stolen Marie Antoinette’s jewels. The story twists further when the two women escape and Victoire sells the gems to live a frivolous, happy life of writing plays and pretending she is someone else.
The book still does not end – next Victoire befriends Statesman Thomas Jefferson who tries to take care of her when she is shot in a mob accident, she fights women’s rights and the French Revolution and, due to the results, she is allowed to return to her village totally forgiven, where she uses her funds to rebuild her inn and gets reacquainted with her long lost daughter.
Because the jacket cover does not have a rating or explain the contents of repeated bi-sexual explicit scenes, the tawdry, violent crimes and overdone excessive storyline, this reader would have wanted better judgment in selecting this as a book to review.