To prepare her for this awesome responsibility, she must be trained to write, read, speak French, dress, act… even breathe.

Thus, the future of Austria and France falls upon Maria Antonia’s young shoulders. Arranged marriages were common in that day and age–as the Empress Theresa (of the Holy Roman Empire of the Germanic Nations) sought to consolidate power among nations by marrying off her children. In this engrossing addition to the Royal Diaries series ( Elizabeth I: Red Rose of the House of Tudor, Cleopatra VII: Daughter of the Nile), Kathryn Lasky invents a diary of the young Marie Antoinette in 1769–the year she is to be married off to Dauphin Louis Auguste, eldest grandson of the French king Louis XV. So writes the headstrong 13-year-old Maria Antonia–future Queen of France–in her diary on October 23, 1769. The best thing of all was getting up every day and trying to crawl into people’s heads-from a Pilgrim girl to a Princess.“I look up now into the oval mirror and see barely a trace of the mud-splattered girl tearing through the woodland on her horse, or the barefoot girl wading at Schonbrunn… I have become what Mama set out for me to be. I could delve into a character like Elizabeth Tudor and try and imagine how she would feel when her father often banished her from the court to live in a lonely castle with her governess. I would not give happily ever after endings when they did not really happen but I could interpret how that person might feel. And there was the added bonus since it was to be fiction I could fill in the gaps that history books and primary source material might leave out. These books were based on people who had really lived-Princesses like Elizabeth Tudor, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, but they kept fictional diaries.įor me both these series were the chance of a lifetime as a writer for it combined two things I love-history and doing research. The Royal Diaries were slightly different from the Dear America ones. What was life like on the Mayflower? Did she find a best friend? What were the storms like? Did she throw up? Was she frightened? How did she feel in this new land? So I could try and imagine how a little pilgrim girl felt when she left to cross the Atlantic Ocean to come to America. In the Dear America series the diaries were based on fictional people who lived through significant events in American history. When my publisher came up with the idea for the Dear America and the Royal Diaries I was thrilled.

Marie antoinette by kathryn lasky