By Faith Simpson | CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Here’s a small confession: I bounced off Versailles. Kathryn Davis’s novel about Marie Antoinette is beautiful sentence by beautiful sentence, but it’s also a cool room-ornate, echoing – where the story rarely raises its voice. And yet that difficulty turns out to be the most interesting thing about it. The book doesn’t want to be a costume drama. It wants to be the feeling of living inside one.

Versailles tells the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé. He will become the sixteenth Louis to rule France, and Antoinette will be his queen – though neither shows a strong inclination toward power, politics, or the roles they have been summoned to play. Antoinette finds herself hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, and the labyrinthine twists and turns of the palace she calls home.

Davis writes in fragments and tableaux. Marie Antoinette often speaks as, or about, her “soul” and brief stage-like interludes give side characters their say. Instead of a historical recap, we get a consciousness moving corridors: the journey from Austria to France at 14, the rituals of Versailles, pregnancies and politics, the diamond necklace scandal’s fog, and the march toward the guillotine. It’s less a straight line than a perfume trail.

Being looked at for a living is the first theme that lands – then keeps landing. Before influencers, there were queens, and Davis treats Antoinette as someone whose job is to be seen. Every glance is a verdict, every gown a headline. When the book lingers on fabric, hair, ceremony, it isn’t fussing. It’s showing the labor of image maintenance. Anyone who’s curated a feed or bitten their tongue under a comment section will recognize the pressure. Performance as survival, and how quickly performance becomes a cage.

That’s where 2025 walks in. If the eighteenth century made a queen’s body the billboard of a nation, our moment makes each of us a one-person court. Versailles reads like an origin story for the optics economy, outfits as statements, rooms as stages, and people as brands. Davis’s queen performs to survive. We perform to be seen by an algorithm that never claps. Different wig, same metrics.

The second theme is girlhood under protocol. Antoinette arrives as a teenager and becomes a symbol before she can become a woman. The novel’s clipped, impressionistic mode captures the way big life events like sex, marriage, and childbirth can feel like they’re happening at you rather than to you when the script has been written elsewhere.

Swap powdered wigs for ring lights and you get a recognizably modern rite of passage: young women onboarding into visibility before they’ve had a chance to locate a self. The book’s fractured voice matches the feeling of growing up while being watched and commented on, each moment immediately converted into content.

Third: the rumor economy. Versailles doesn’t diagram The Affair of the Diamond Necklace so much as stage the atmosphere that made it possible. Gossip in this book behaves like weather, arriving, enclosing, and hard to argue with. That’s painfully contemporary.

Now add AI. We live where a rumor can outrun a correction by days and where a convincing fake can outrun both. Davis isn’t accounting for facts so much as dramatizing how stories colonize a life. That’s the modern ache. You can lose the narrative of yourself to other people’s content.

A fourth, subtler thread is space as psychology. Davis is exquisitely good at rooms. Hallways, gardens, mirrored walls. They aren’t scenery so much as an emotional map. The palace dazzles and disorients, it shelters and blinds. Anyone who’s known a house that kept them safe and small once-a family home full of love and rules, an office with perks and politics-will recognize the double edge.

Architecture=interface. Versailles shapes how people move, speak, and think; so do our apps. The palace’s mirrors curate behavior the way dashboards and comment counters do, reflecting us back until we perform the expected self. Rooms make rules. So do platforms.

There’s also luxury as distraction. Davis returns to fabrics, galas, and gleam-not as decadence porn but as a grammar of misdirection. In an era of price tags on everything and “quiet grandeur” aesthetics, the novel’s attention to surfaces doubles as critique. Beauty can soothe but it can also smother what’s urgent. Comfort becomes complicated.

One more 2025 rhyme: public women, old scripts. The book sidesteps the “let her eat cake” meme and refuses both saint and villain. That ambivalence tracks with our tired cycle – idolize, overexpose, punish, forget. Versailles asks what’s left of a person after the discourse is done with her.

Motherhood as public property hums underneath. Fertility, heirs, pregnancy – here they’re national business. The resonance with contemporary fights over reproductive autonomy is loud without the novel ever sermonizing. It’s simply the fact of a body requisitioned by other people’s needs.

Now for what didn’t work for me – and it’s tied to those same choices. The prose is symbolic, closer to poem than plot. Scenes don’t so much develop as shimmer and pass. The cameo “playlets” that punctuate the book are clever but sometimes break the spell just as it’s forming. If you come looking for historical novel satisfactions, thick dialogue, granular politics, or the pulse of cause and effect then you may find yourself pressing your face against elegantly frosted glass.

Still, the language has bite. The opening line, “My soul is going on a trip. I want to talk about her.”, announces the conceit with an antique flourish and a modern shrug. Davis’s sentences balance decadence and doom, the sweetness of silk laid against the knowledge that the blade is coming. Rather than plead for Antoinette’s innocence or prosecute her guilt, the book asks a different question: What does it feel like to be the person everyone thinks they already know?

So who is Versailles for? If you want a straight factual page turner, try another door. But if you’re up for a mood piece about popular womanhood, about how spectacle deforms the self, how rumor colonizes a life, how a place can become your fate, then, Davis offers a strange, resonant experience. Even my resistance became part of the reading. I wanted more plot because the character herself had so little control over hers. The form, in other words, argues the theme.

In a season of loud novels, Versailles whispers. I didn’t love it. I kept thinking about it, which is its own kind of recommendation. The book leaves you with a handful of questions that feel less eighteenth century than modern day. How much of myself is mine if everyone’s looking? What stories about me have outpaced the truth, human or machine made? And what places, whether it be corporate, algorithmic, familial, shape the way I see and am seen?

That, at least, is a conversation worth having, even if you’d rather be anywhere than another court ball.

To learn more about the book, or it’s author visit the Hatchette Book Group website. •

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