My new novel is now available!

As of today, my new novel, Wolves and Brioches, is available in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon sites worldwide. I can't express how excited I am to type these words.

I got the idea for Wolves and Brioches when I was in the final months of editing Hearts at Dawn and getting it ready for publication. I knew I was going to miss working on Hearts at Dawn, to put it mildly. Novel writing is rarely, if ever, easy, but there are so many moments of magic in it. Knowing I had another novel to work on was exciting -- and comforting.

 

Wolves and Brioches was inspired by a few things. For one, I had been reading lots of fairy tales to my son at bedtime, and so many versions of "Little Red Riding Hood" end with the wolf getting stones sewn into his stomach and dying an agonizing death.

 

Sure, you could say he deserved it. I mean, he tried to kill at least two innocent people. But the stone thing sort of sat wrong with me. It seemed excessively cruel.

 

And then there was that little spark of rebelliousness in me. It’s always been there in one way or another, behind my fairly staid facade. But that year, lockdown restrictions exacerbated it. A part of my reasonable, homebody self wanted to be free.

 

And then there were the wolves. In the parts of Paris where I was allowed to go outside for a while, graffiti artists like Loup Y-Es-Tu were decorating the walls of buildings and barriers with often life-size paper drawings of wolves. The wolves howled, stalked around corners, and also did some very un-wolflike things. Some read books or played hide and seek with a little girl wearing underwear or shorts and red cape, drawn by artist Little Chaperon Rouge. Other wolves leapt into action with Marianne, the symbol of France herself. In the same neighborhood, another artist depicted a similar, though slightly more cartoon-like wolf howling from behind some weeds, a question mark signifying what he was trying to say with that howl: Why, why, why?

It spoke to me then and it still speaks to me.

 

With all these wolves in my mind, I began to think of a version of "Little Red Riding Hood" where the wolf isn’t so bad. Maybe he even hates his bad reputation. And maybe he’s friends with Little Red Riding Hood, or maybe more.

 

There are many "Little Red Riding Hood" retellings, a number of them excellent. One thing a huge majority have in common is that they take place in the woods, or at least somewhere rural. This was a bit of a catch for me. I appreciate nature, but as a city person through and through, my inspiration rarely brings me to such locations. In fact, the place that inspires me the most is my beloved adopted home city, Paris.

 

But how could I bring "Little Red Riding Hood" here?

 

Another thing that inspires me is history, and almost immediately I thought of a legendary wolf (or possibly not a wolf, depending on what theory you believe) from France’s past, the real-life equivalent to the Big Bad Wolf if there ever was one: The Beast of Gévaudan.

 

This creature, which remains officially unidentified today, was responsible for over 100 deaths and injuries in the Gévaudan province of France (today the Lozère department). After three years of terrorizing local peasants and shepherds -- mostly women and children -- the Beast of Gévaudan was finally killed (or so most people think) in 1767.

 

This is also a story that takes place deep in the French countryside. I started to wonder, though, did the Beast of Gévaudan have any ties to Paris?

 

It turns out that it did! After the Beast was killed, it was stuffed and brought to the city for King Louis XV, who had ordered its death, to see. But it turns out that nothing went as planned. The Beast’s remains weren’t properly preserved; they began to stink so badly that a servant who was among the group bringing this prize to Paris even allegedly got sick from them.

 

The King may have heard the rumors about this, or he may simply not have wanted to see yet another Beast, after he was brought one several years before that was wrongly believed to be the Beast of Gévaudan. And so, he declined a presumed honor of having the remains in his palace.

 

It’s thought that the Beast’s damaged, stinking remains were instead hurriedly buried somewhere in the garden of the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, a hôtel particulier (mansion) that belonged to a relative of the Marquis d’Apcher, who had sponsored the final hunt.

 

This means that Paris is the Beast of Gévaudan’s final resting place!

 

…But why this isn’t a bigger deal?

 

I’ve read lots of books about strange history and places in Paris, but I’ve never come across anything mentioning the spot where the Beast of Gévaudan is buried. 

It turns out that the reason is that you can’t visit it. The Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt was sold off many years ago and parceled into residential buildings, its grounds paved over into streets. Today, Beast of Gévaudan scholars believe the remains are buried deep below layers of pavement on the rue des Beaux-Arts or the rue de Seine, or maybe beneath the quais of the Seine.

 

Although I was disappointed that I couldn’t visit the Beast of Gévauadan’s remains (weird tourism is my Achilles heel), I was also elated: I could set a historically accurate story that involved the Beast here, in my favorite city!

 

This meant that I had to time travel (alas, only metaphorically so) back to the 1760’s.

 

As I developed the story, I spent years trying to immerse myself into this time period. I came out learning a lot, but not feeling the kind of closeness and passion for it that I did when I researched the 1870-1871 Siege of Paris for my previous novel, Hearts at Dawn.

 

Part of that may be because of the way things were documented back then. We have many primary sources, artwork, maps, etc., but unlike mid- to late -19th century works, potentially useful things like memoirs, descriptions of the city, etc., tended to be surprisingly nondescriptive and abstract when it came to setting the scene. While 19th century writers of all sorts can be so descriptive as to sometimes be overwhelming, in most of the 18th century sources I consulted, I often found so much vaguery. 

Even Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose multi-volume Tableau de Paris is a major, vital reference about the city in the 1780’s-90’s, sometimes describes neighborhoods and other features of the city in a reasonable amount of detail, but other times he’ll just share his opinions and give no description whatsoever. This was especially glaring to me when I eagerly turned to his description of the Marais, a neighborhood that’s still full of hôtels particuliers like the ones my main characters live in. Instead of describing those, Mercier talks about his dislike of the neighborhood's stuffy inhabitants, not even going into a huge amount of detail about that.

To be fair, the Marais was no longer a fashionable area in the late 18th century; I kept Odette’s family there because of their ties to their home as well as their unusual social status. But still, I would have liked to know what Mercier saw back then when he strolled those streets, many of them following the same paths as they do today. 

After the extensive documentation of life in the 1850’s-70’s that I had been lucky enough to have at hand for Hearts at Dawn, my experience with the 1760’s-80’s was disappointing, to say the least. But maybe it was also due to my just not connecting with this era the same way I did -- and do -- with the late 19th century.

I did learn a lot of fascinating things about Paris in the 1760’s, and tried to incorporate so many of them into this book. And one thing that did really speak to me throughout my research was that this was a time when the sentiments that would lead to the French Revolution in 1789 were brewing. Here was something my unsatisfied, rebellious self could relate to in a way (although for the record, I think the Revolution’s violence was excessive).

That sense of the establishment against the less privileged was what inspired the dynamic between Odette, my story’s Red Riding Hood, and her family. 

Writing a novel isn't typically an easy endeavor. You face distraction, disappointment, and downright fatigue pretty regularly. Add research that's hard to connect with, and creating a book can be even harder. But there were so many good moments along the way, moments when things came together, when I untangled some knot in a plotline, when a character felt so familiar to me it was as if they were someone I knew in real life. It wasn't easy, but I’ve had fun writing about Odette and her friend Louis finding each other in 1760’s Paris, figuring out magic, and ultimately and unexpectedly saving the city (No need for a spoiler alert; they announce their victory from the start). I hope you’ll enjoy their story, too.

As of today, Wolves and Brioches is available in paperback and Kindle formats on Amazon. If you think it sounds like fun, or if the story speaks to your own rebellious nature, I hope you’ll give it a read (and an honest review, if  you’d be so kind).

Happy reading!