I am in the middle of a nostalgia craze. For 2025, I am taking a second (or even third) look at some of the fiction I enjoyed in my younger days. As part of this, I have discovered just how much I personally have changed over the decades.
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| Anne Golon |
It surprises me how much I loved historical fiction when I was in high school and college. I hated actual history, but readily buried myself in historical fiction. That’s why I happily my nostalgia effort by jumping back into rereading the best, most satisfying historical romance series ever. The thirteen volumes of the Angelique series by French author Anne Golon takes readers across the seventeenth century globe, beginning in France during the reign of Louis XIV, the illustrious Sun King.
The first book in the series was published back when I was still in high school, and was my very first romance. The heroine, Angelique, begins as a teenager from an impoverished noble French family who spends time playing with local children. She slowly grows from a self-centered teen into a mature woman who finds her soulmate and raises two sons she would do anything for. Then her love story is interrupted as she, and we as readers, has to watch her beloved's execution and tumbles into poverty.
In many ways I feel like I grew up right alongside the heroine as the books progress. Over the years I haunted bookstores in search of the next book in the series. The heroine matures in the books she realizes she cant be helpless with two children to protect. The tagline for the books is "the passionate adventures" but it ends up more of "the boss-lady experiences" of a woman prepared to do whatever it takes to protect her kids. That includes
- becoming the leader of a group of thieves
- blackmailing a member of the king's court to make certain her children have a royal future
- taking full advantage of rumors linking her to the king while actually avoiding him. (Imagine being self-assured enough to say no to the king.)
- running a business as a single mother
- and leading a peasants' rebellion against the king
She also finds herself taken prisoner during a business trip on the Barbery Coast of North Africa where she is auctioned off to a masked pirate captain. She escapes from the pirate, then uses him and his ship to help her evacuate a group of religious refugees to the new world. By this time she is in her forties, and making the kinds of marks on the world I can only wish I could. Over the course of five books the once childish teen has grown and into a politically acute business woman and warrior, so mature and competent that readers easily accept her efficacy when she negotiates with Native American tribes after she arrives in French Canada.
Then, in book #6 of the series everything changes. She learns that her first husband, the soul mate we all saw executed back in the middle of book #1, is actually still alive and well. He is also the pirate captain in disguise. The question is, what does he feel about her now? And what should she do with the man who has asked her to matty him and is willing to kill that pirate if he has to?
Trust me, this author's writing was so good she actually makes the soap opera scenario work. Every time I reread book 6, "Angelique in Love," my heart flutters.
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| Versailles, France |
The path of true love has never been less smooth or more intriguing for readers than it is on the pages of these books. And not only are there mountains of history and miles of geography (the author and her husband were such meticulous researchers the books could be used in lessons) but loyal readers have spent vacations touring in Angelique's footsteps both in Europe and the New World freom Versailles to Morocco to New England. The books have been translated from its original French into over twenty different languages. I even taught myself to read French so I could read the last two books in the series that were never translated into English. That’s the pull this story has always had for me. Were I stuck on a deserted island, I'd want a copy of this series to keep me going.
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