Cake Eater

Seventeen-year-old Marie Antoinette arrives in 3070 Versailles, an empire on the verge of collapse—replete with android guards, state-run surveillance, and ubiquitous social media—in Dahlin’s intriguingly bizarre alternate history debut, a reimagining of the French Revolution. After a cataclysmic climate event wipes out half the world’s population, the remaining members of the 31st-century French ruling class take refuge at Versailles while citizens outside the palace suffer. Armed with her bejeweled holofone, socialite Marie and her shy, sensitive new husband Louis oppose the Third Estate, a faction of the French government that’s now responsible for brutal suppression of dissenting citizens through media censorship. Using Marie’s social cunning and Louis’s hacking skills, the teen rulers must find a way to maintain their power—or risk being ground down by surrounding Versailles nobility. While Dahlin occasionally struggles to balance this jam-packed novel’s many ingredients with its real-life historical context, resulting in thin present, past, and future parallels, the cast is theatrically rendered, and the increasingly wild extrapolations of the source material are innovative. The narrative’s dark, acerbic tone lends an effectively unnerving atmosphere to this frenetic combination of rococo aesthetics and modern social commentary. A completely singular read. Characters cue as white. Ages 13–up. (Aug.)