Revolver

Jennifer Donnelly Makes History Sing

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, September 28, 2010

When you visit Jennifer Donnelly in her Dutchess County home, high on a hilltop with swoony views of the Catskills, you may wonder if you’ve entered some other century. Roses tumble from urns, flanking an entry with neoclassical columns and marble floors, where an inquisitive greyhound greets visitors. Two Hudson River-style canvases lean against walls, still unframed. An upstairs hall sports a sectional street map of 18th-century Paris.

“It was built in the 1980s,” says the author, a striking blonde with expressive dark eyes. She explains that the house was gutted by a Wall Street tycoon and once played party house to a rock star’s entourage. The Hudson River canvasses? Painted by a former tenant in Brooklyn. The map? It’s research.

Donnelly has a talent for straddling centuries, as her just-released Revolution (Delacorte, 2010) attests. Ostensibly a young-adult novel, this tale of two rebel teen girls, one from contemporary Brooklyn and one from revolution-era Paris, is sure to find fans among adult readers, especially those who like their historical fiction brimming with messy, exuberant life.

“It’s very important to me that history lives and breathes—I don’t want it to be cod liver oil,” says Donnelly. In her hands, it’s more like Red Bull.

Revolution has an impeccably hip soundtrack (Natalie Merchant, another local century-straddler, appears in the acknowledgments). The novel begins in the dark throes of privilege. Seventeen-year-old Andi is a fiercely talented guitarist, her passion for music all that prevents her from drowning in grief and guilt after the death of her beloved younger brother. Overmedicating, flirting with suicide, and ignoring her studies at an elite private school, she’s whisked off to Paris by her absentee father. When she opens the secret compartment of an antique guitar case and finds the diary of Alexandrine Paradis, a teenage street performer swept up in the Terror, her life takes an unexpected and dangerous turn.