Revolution (novel)

Revolution

Author	Jennifer Donnelly
Language	English
Genre	Young Adult Historical Fiction
Publisher	Delacorte Press
Published in English	October 2010
Pages	472
ISBN

Revolution is a young adult historical fiction novel by Jennifer Donnelly about a girl named Andi Alpers who is struggling with drugs, thoughts of suicide, and the way her family has fallen apart after the death of her ten-year-old brother. When her father takes her with him to Paris on a business trip to ensure she works on her school thesis, Andi discovers a journal written by a girl her age, Alexandrine Paradis, two centuries earlier which has its own tragedies inside. Revolution was an Amazon Best Book of the Year (2010) and honored by Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal; the audiobook version received a 2011 American Library Association Odyssey Honor.

Andi Alpers is doing the best she can to take care of her mother's deep depression while popping pills for her own. Her father is off living with his pregnant 25-year-old girlfriend, her grades are falling apart, and if she does not turn in her thesis outline after break, she will be kicked out of school. Her best friend Vijay does all he can to help her move on. But she does not care, because she knows it is her fault that her ten-year-old brother was killed by a crazy man named Max, who, trying to stay away from the cops grabbed her brother Truman and held a knife to his neck. Max, feeling threatened by a cop pulling out a gun, jumped into the street and was hit by a delivery van while still holding Andi's brother, killing them both,while she was ditching school with Nick Goode when she really should have been walking her brother to school. The only thing that keeps her alive is her music.

But then her father swoops back into the picture after hearing about her grades. He ships her mother off into a mental hospital to recover and takes Andi to Paris with him to make sure she writes the outline for her thesis. He is there to do a DNA test on the remains of a heart believed to be that of Louis-Charles, the young son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who was locked away during the French Revolution and believed to have died in the tower at the age of ten. Despite this, rumors of the Lost Dauphin's escape were numerous, as were the people who stepped up to claim the throne at the end of the Revolution.