THE BLUE ROSE by Kate Forsyth

For all fans of historical fiction, get your hands on this. And with a love story to completely hold the interest, this is a great read. The places you will go and the things you will see when you read this. If you want to learn about the French Revolution without wading through history textbooks, or about the early days of European trade and contact with China, then this book is a great place to start. It is not weighty or turgid or heavy going, and with the fictional stories of the main characters closely intertwined with the historical events, it makes for a really good book.

The story opens in a chateau on an estate in Brittany where young aristocratic Viviane lives with her awful aunt and occasional visits from her tyrannical father, who lives at the court of Louis VI in Paris or Versailles. Her father engages a young English botanist, David, to create a garden along the lines of the gardens at Versailles. Naturally these two fall in love, a forbidden love as Viviane is destined for an arranged marriage with a fellow aristocrat. Naturally disaster follows, the two are separated and Viviane is despatched to the French court. Viviane is a smart girl, easily able to move between the aristocracy and the revolutionaries but even so she finds herself getting ever closer to Madame Guillotine.

Meanwhile David, thinking he has been betrayed by Viviane, decides to restart his life by following in the footsteps of his hero Sir Joseph Banks, going on a voyage to China to search for new plants to take back to Europe, in particular camellia sinensus - the tea plant - which the English are desperate to obtain so they can start growing their own instead of importing from China. David is also on the search for the rarest of roses - the blue rose - which he had promised Viviane he would try to locate for her.

Naturally there's a happy ending, but what adventures these two have in the years before they finally find each other. David and Viviane are great characters, a true case of opposites attracting which makes them more real. The writer obviously loves her history, bringing the horror of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror truly alive. Her writing about those exploratory sea voyages, and what China was like in the early days of contact with Europe/England is fascinating. Despite all the history there is nothing high brow or text book  about this novel, being a great balance between fact and fiction.