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Love. Magic. Revolution.
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.
451 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 5, 2019
“Remember—magic is a cheater’s game, and everyone who sees it wants to play.”
Life is hard enough in 18th-century France, and few know that better than Camille, who's been forced to take care of her younger sister and older, alcoholic brother when their parents pass from smallpox. She uses small magics to convert scraps into coins, but they're barely making ends meet when Camille finally decides to explore a side of magic her mother always warned her away from — a type of 'la magie' that can change her very appearance, and win her a ticket into Louis XVI's palace in search of riches and safety.
Little by little, magic was erasing her. Sometimes she felt it might kill her.
She hated la magie ordinaire, but it was all she had.
"What else is there to do with a life than spend it?"
Though she'd tried so hard to hold it all, in the end it ran away like water through her fingers. Nothing stayed.