* Photo credit to The Closet *
Okay, so the inside cover. I have no idea who those peeps are in the upper left corner. I don’t even know if the third person down on the right side is a chick or a dude. The guy about to French the French maid is definitely do-able. And look! It’s little bebe Lila Fowler, with her mommy, daddy, and her daddy’s unibrow.
Watch yourself—this one’s a doozy.
Lili de Beautemps is a spoiled, feisty beauty growing up in luxury during the French Revolution. She’s got a crush on Georges Oiseleur, a hottie who works on her family’s land and warns her about the coming uprising, but she instead admires his strong chin. When one of her douchey suitors doesn’t rescue her from a runaway horse and leaves Georges to save her, Lili begins to wonder if George Michael is right: Sometimes the clothes do not make the man. Even though the maid, Georges’s sister, breaks down and tells Lili that trouble is a-brewin’, Lili’s all, “Fiddle dee dee, I’ll think about it tomorrow.” That’s too bad, because the peasants storm Winterthorn, the de Beautemps’ palatial estate, and haul the family to the guillotine. It’s oddly disturbing for an SVH novel. But just before Lili’s about to get her head hacked off, Georges rides up on his noble steed and escorts her to safety. Then he dumps her outside of Paris and says, “Lata, giiirrrrl.” Pretend that’s in French.
Three years later, Lili is slaving away as a seamstress when she meets a rich lady from her past life who invites her to a soiree. There, Lili meets Count Matthieu de Bizac and they begin seeing each other, but the problem is that he thinks she’s a fine, fancy lady. They get married, he finds out the truth, but then the new problem is that he’s already married to someone else. She kindly finds this out when he randomly disappears one day and she has to go out hunting for him…whilst knocked up! A child out of wedlock—good thing she doesn’t live in Sweet Valley, am I right? She moves into an apartment above a boulangerie, which is run by kindly (but FAT!) Marie Chardin, who cares for Lili during her pregnancy. Then Lili dies in childbirth (this is such a convenient way to get rid of the female leads) but not before declaring that her daughter is named Celeste.
Meanwhile, Georges Oiseleur is now super rich and esteemed…but he’s so very lonely. His heart still yearns for Lili! Somehow he finds out that Lili was married to the Count de Bizac and finds her death certificate. Ouch, y’all. He makes it his mission to find Lili’s child, who has just turned sixteen and been shipped off to work as a maid in the household of the Marquis de Bocage, and now she hates her life. Georges, a guest in the house, spots her there and is reminded of Lili, so he gives her anonymous presents and makes sure that the house’s tutor (whom he winds up marrying) teaches her how to read. It is through the gift of knowledge that Celeste meets Marc, the marquis’ foxy son/heir, and they fall madly in love but he is forbidden to marry her because she’s a lowly servant girl. The family boots her out of the house, and Georges picks Celeste up off the street and learns that he’s chatting up Lili’s kid, and he tells her that he’s preserved the Winterthorn estate for her, so she’s totally worth a zillion dollars and is now free to marry Marc. Oh, bah. I wish Marc would’ve shunned his family first in order to prove his love for her. I don’t like how that love story magically wrapped up. You gotta earn it, Marc!
So skip forward about fifty years: Celeste’s old as the hills now (but the book stresses that she’s a GILF!), and she has an impetuous, feminist granddaughter named Rose, who’s all about being independent and doesn’t believe she should smooch her best friend Pierre Oiseleur. (Are you catching on that the ancestors are going to come close to marrying each other a billion times again?) Pierre pines for her for a freaking decade but she still won’t throw him a bone. Instead she runs around with bohemians, writes novels, and is frankly sort of annoyingly rambunctious. She rebuffs Pierre’s advances, until one day, she inexplicably decides, “Oh, hey, I guess I would hit that,” but of course that’s when he gets married and starts having bebes with some other lady. Eep! So Rose must settle for some boring American instead and regrets it for the rest of her days.
Her kid, Isabelle, doesn’t fare much better. When she’s sixteen, she falls for French soldier Jacques Oiseleur (oh, for the love of…) and they marry in secret before he goes off to fight the good fight in WWI. Then his best friend Charles Doret comes back and says that Jacques was blown to bits and winds up marrying Isabelle three years later. Then who should stumble back down the dusty path but Jacques! Needless to say, he’s pretty pissed about how everything went down. He’s like, “FUCK FRANCE,” changes his name to Jack Fowler, and moves to Sweet Valley. Surprisingly (I say that lightly), so do Isabelle and Charles. Jack and Charles are in this lifetime feud over whether or not Charles jumped the gun on believing Jack was dead, so a Montague/Capulet situation evolves and Charles becomes the mayor of Sweet Valley and ruins Jack’s ranch and blah blah, Isabelle is miserable for the rest of her freaking life like her mom.
Skipskipskip to the grandkids again, who have the most boring story of all. George Fowler vows to never be poor again and works his ass off to be some computer magnate. Then he woos Grace Doret in 1971, NOT 1968 like the back cover claims (scoff), but Grace is betrothed to some guy. Oh yeah, and the families hate each other. Still, they elope, and then everything goes to shit. Oddly enough, the families continue to hate each other even when the initiators of the feud—Jack and Isabelle—reconcile and hold hands once little bebe Lila is born. Oh, life! Anyway, George turns into a controlling workaholic DICK and tells Grace that she can’t go see her family, and when he forbids his wifey from seeing Isabelle before she dies, Grace is like, “Screw you!” and he’s all “No, screw you!” and hands her walking papers.
Then book gets lazy and the rest of it is taken from The Morning After and The Wedding, but I commend the series for the continuity…for once!
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