An ordinary girl befriends the Princess of France on the eve of the French Revolution.
Isabelle, an eleven-year-old lacemaker, is delivering lace to the palace of Versailles one day when she literally stumbles into Marie Antoinette. The queen rescues the girl from being trampled by courtiers, and then proposes that Isabelle come play with her daughter Princess Marie-Therese. Thus begins Isabelle's dual life -- in the mornings, a bourgeois lacemaker with her mother and grandmother in a two-room apartment in the town; in the afternoons, a playmate to a princess in a fairytale palace.
But the fairytale is not to last. Rumours of starvation in the countryside lead to whispers of revolution. How can Isabelle reconcile what she hears in the town with the very real and often kind family she knows in the palace? And which side is she truly on? This vivid portrait of France on the eve of the Revolution is also a touching tale of two friends torn apart by class and the powerful force of demographic freedoms
Ages: 8-12
