The Disenchantment

Starred review from November 14, 2022
Bell’s inventive debut revisits an obscure incident in French history known as the Affair of the Poisons. In late 17th-century Paris, Marie Catherine la Jumelle is unhappily married to the older Baron de Cardonnoy and escapes her domestic drudgery by attending salons. At one, she meets the charismatic Victoire de Conti, who writes poetry and loves to scandalize her fellow salonnières by dressing in gentlemen’s clothes. Marie Catherine and Victoire go on to become discreet lovers, but after the baron discovers the affair (which he thinks is with a man) and confronts his wife about it, he is shot to death by a masked man. Javert-like Lt. Gen. of Police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie immediately suspects Marie Catherine of the crime. De la Reynie is obsessed with eradicating the fortune-tellers, rogue priests and sorcerers who are supposedly dealing in corrupted sacraments, spells, and poisons, and it is among this lot that Marie Catherine tries to find someone to pin her husband’s murder on. The author excels at creating a hothouse atmosphere in which depravity, sensuality, and duplicity reside side by side, and Marie Catherine’s plight builds in suspense as the noose tightens around her, leading to an ending that turns the novel into a rousing feminist fable. It’s a bold and inspired mix of Les Liaisons Dangereuses and The Crucible.

December 1, 2022

In award-winning debuter Bell's The Disenchantment, unhappily married Baroness Marie Catherine and self-confident Mademoiselle de Conti become lovers in a 17th-century Paris beset by scheming nobility and servants immured in witchcraft (35,000-copy first printing). In The Secret Book of Flora Lea, from New York Times best-selling, Christy Award-winning Henry, Hazel unwraps a package at the rare bookstore where she works to discover a book telling the story she made up for her little sister, who vanished after they were evacuated from World War II London two decades previously. Jackson follows up award-winning nonfiction with To Die Beautiful, based on the life of World War II Dutch Resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, who also figures in Noelle Salazar's recent Angels of the Resistance (50,000-copy first printing). In Morton's latest, Jess has an uncomfortable Homecoming when she returns from London to Australia after the grandmother who raised her is hospitalized; she learns that her family is linked to a horrific unsolved 1959 crime (250,000-copy first printing).New York Times best-selling author Noble tells the story of The Tiffany Girls, who did much of the design and construction of Tiffany's glorious glassworks without credit (75,000-copy first printing). Paul's Did You Hear About Kitty Karr? features Elise St. John, a young Black woman who is startled that she and her sisters have inherited the multimillion-dollar estate of star Kitty Karr Tate; then she learns that Kitty was actually her grandmother, passing for white (100,000-copy first printing). After the celebratedAriadne and Elektra, Saint brings us Atalanta, the story of a masterly huntress who was the only woman to sail with the Argonauts (125,000-copy first printing). A four-time winner of the American Library Association's William Boyd Young Award (for excellence in military fiction), New York Times best-selling author Shaara limns the life of Theodore Roosevelt in The Old Lion (100,000-copy first printing). Working at the Jeu de Paume during World War II after having fled Germany, Sophie executes a Paris Deception in Turnbull's latest; she rescues modernist paintings looted from Jewish families and set for destruction by smuggling them out of the museum and replacing them with forgeries created by her sister-in-law (75,000-copy paperback and 10,000-copy hardcover first printing). Famed novelist/historian Weir follows up her "Six Tudor Queens" series by reimagining Henry VIII in The King's Pleasure.

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May 1, 2023
In the first part of Bell's debut, Baroness Marie Catherine's husband is determined to find the man his valet saw her kissing the day before. Enraged, he asks: ""Do you think I'm going to let you put horns on me in my own house?"" The reader and the baroness share a secret: Marie Catherine's lover is Victoire Rose de Bourbon, Mademoiselle de Conti, dressed in male clothing. An author's note explains that Bell's seventeenth-century Paris-set novel is inspired by actual events, specifically the Affair of the Poisons, in which accusations spread among nobles of poisonings to secure inheritance, which led to paranoia and backlash against women who held intellectual salons and spoke in subversion of patriarchy. A murder catalyzes Marie Catherine's flight through the city, accompanied by people who are mystical and mysterious. The crafting of fairy tales weaves heavily into the novel as Marie Catherine uses the stories to entertain her children, all resulting in a compelling, textured novel of blended genres.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
A secret romance between two noblewomen in 1680s Paris is threatened by the Affair of the Poisons in this bewitching work of historical fiction. Marie Catherine la Jumelle, Baronne de Cardonnoy, lives a life of prosperous repression. Married to a mercurial and ambitious husband she cannot love, she finds solace in her two children, the opportunities to spin fairy tales at women's salons, and the affections of Victoire de Conti, an impetuous, androgynous Princess of the Blood. Their love affair thrives despite the ever looming threat of discovery, until a misunderstanding with a portrait painter, paranoia sweeping the city in the wake of several high-profile poisonings, and an unexpected act of violence combine to endanger the secret life the two have built. Murder plots, assignations, investigations, and court machinations all follow and drive the novel to its nerve-wracking and moving conclusion. Bell elegantly balances the passion of a romance with the tension of crime fiction, all while conjuring a Paris rich in sensuous detail. From the first page, she situates the reader in a very specific moment in time without overloading the prose with self-congratulatory evidence of her own research. Marie Catherine and Victoire's alienation from heterosexual society and longing to find others like themselves cannot help but resonate with contemporary queer readers, but Bell deftly avoids ascribing modern identities to them and allows them to be women of their own time. With similar precision, Bell uses her extensive cast of characters, whose various points of view the reader glimpses through shifting third-person limited narration, to explore class tensions. Poor women and rich women may come up against different limitations and employ contrasting methods of self-reinvention, but all of them are hungry for freedom--watching them strive for it is utterly captivating. An astonishingly accomplished debut that brings a past full of intrigue and ardor to life on the page.

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