History or Fiction? Guest Post by Elizabeth Loupas

When choosing historical fiction, do you migrate towards books whose protagonists were actual historical personages, or do you prefer fictional characters placed in a historical setting? Author Elizabeth Loupas, whose second novel, THE FLOWER READER, goes on sale today, has written both types. The protagonist of Elizabeth's first novel, THE SECOND DUCHESS (NAL 2011), was Barbara of Austria, the true-life second wife of Alfonso II d'Este, the duke of Ferrara. THE FLOWER READER brings to life Rinette Leslie, a fictional sixteenth-century Scottish noblewoman who is able to foresee the future by reading flowers. In today's guest post, Elizabeth discusses her own preferences in the historical versus fictional protagonist debate.

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Historical? Or Fiction? Or both?

by Elizabeth Loupas

Some readers of historical fiction are suspicious of fictional characters introduced into historical settings. Is the fictional character created as a device to tell the story of a famous historical personage? Will she (or he) spend every scene listening at doors and peeping through peepholes? (We know all those Renaissance palaces were riddled with peepholes and secret passages.) Will the author resort to convoluted machinations to justify the fictional character’s presence whenever something important happens to the historical personage? Why not simply let the historical personage tell her (or his) own story?

A good question. And what I like to call “biographical fiction” can be wonderful and satisfying. Margaret George’s novels of historical women are good examples (Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Mary Called Magdalene, Elizabeth I), as is Susan Kay’s unforgettable Legacy and debut author Sophie Perinot’s The Sister Queens, to mention only a tiny few. A meticulously researched and carefully imagined historical “biography” can be both enriching and entertaining.

But sometimes I just want a book with more story. I want plot and drama and excitement and adventure and romance. The real lives of well-known historical personages don’t always include these elements, and trying to add them in by fictionalizing love affairs, conspiracies and betrayals, secret lives as detectives, or magical vampire or zombie powers (no, I’m not kidding, although of course you already know that), aren’t usually very satisfying. Building a story around a fictional character who lives in the same world as a historical personage offers a blank canvas, and for me, anyway, gives much more scope for storytelling.

I think the trick, if one is going to use a fictional protagonist, is to make the fictional character truly the center of the story, with his or her own desires and needs, passions and hurts and joys and sorrows. The historical personages must be supporting characters—and you know, that gives the writer a chance to really look at a historical personage in a fresh, slightly different way. A not-such-a-big-deal way. Because history looks back and sometimes makes individuals more dramatically central than they very well may have been in their own time.

I love all kinds of historical fiction, both with and without fictional protagonists. It’s the history that makes it magical—the sense-drenched presence of another time and place. I love to find new ways to look at real personages from history, to read about them clothed in flesh and blood and flaws and foibles and not as just as names in history books. But I also love the idea that there may be people—call them fictional characters if you will—we’ve never met and stories we’ve never heard before, living their lives around the edges of known history.

The Flower Reader makes its fictional protagonist Rinette Leslie central to her own story, and takes a glancing look at Mary Stuart in the process. For more information, visit Elizabeth Loupas’s website at www.elizabethloupas.com.

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I reviewed THE FLOWER READER here a few weeks ago. No need for flowers for me to predict that you'll be swept up in Elizabeth's imaginative yet historically-grounded story!

To celebrate the publication of THE FLOWER READER, Elizabeth has generously offered to supply a handmade bookmark to one lucky reader. The custom-made bookmark is signed and numbered by flower artist Lesley Hegewald and made of real pressed flowers and leaves. Elizabeth will include a note identifying the flowers used and explaining their meaning in Rinette's lush world of floromancy.

If you are interested in entering the drawing, please comment on this post with your email address. Entries may be posted until 11 pm PST on Sunday, April 14, 2012. Winner's name, chosen at random, will be posted on Monday, April 15. Good luck, and best wishes to Elizabeth on her launch day.

Review: THE FLOWER READER by Elizabeth Loupas

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

As I was reading Elizabeth Loupas's new novel, THE FLOWER READER (NAL, April 2012), this verse from the old nursery rhyme kept running through my head, and quite justifiably. For in Loupas's second novel, flowers have the power to foretell the future, and knowing what grows in one's own--and others'--gardens can quite literally be a matter of life and death. In order to heed the flowers' warnings, however, one must know how to read the blossoms. Luckily for Mary, the new Queen of Scots, her attendant, Marina Leslie of Granmuir, does. The flowers share secrets Rinette must use to extricate Mary--and herself--from the web of treachery that surrounds them.

This romantic adventure unfolds as a reverse quest--instead of seeking a sacred object, the heroine must prevent the object from being found. In question is a silver casket owned by Mary of Guise, Scotland's ailing queen regent, which contains ciphered secrets regarding Scotland's most powerful noblemen and personal prophecies penned by Nostradamus himself. Moments before her death, Mary of Guise calls Rinette to her bedside to prophesy, a pretext that allows her to entrust the casket to Rinette, who promises to smuggle it out of the castle and into the hands of the new Queen Mary. Rinette escapes with the casket hidden in an armload of flowers, but soon makes a fatal mistake--she shows the casket and its contents to her adored but power-hungry husband, who proceeds to offer it for sale, without Rinette's knowledge, to interested parties in Scotland, France and England. When her husband is murdered to prevent the transaction, Rinette refuses to surrender the casket to Queen Mary until his murderer is brought to justice. As she works with an unlikely ally to unmask the murderer and unravel the plot that threatens the queen, Rinette must rely on her ability to read the flowers to protect herself, her family and her heart.

I must admit I was a bit wary of the floromancy angle as I started this book. Not particularly drawn to fiction with a supernatural slant, I was afraid the flower reading might be little more than a gimmick that would overshadow the novel's historical content. However, Loupas quickly put my reservations to rest. Even though the sixteenth-century characters accept Rinette's powers unquestioningly, Loupas never forces the modern reader to do so. Rather, she intimates that Rinette's ability to read the future in flowers is little more than an uncanny ability to read people themselves, to intuit their basic moral strengths and character flaws from the slimmest of evidence. Rinette associates people with particular blooms based on what she perceives of their personalities and then devises a probable future for them based on what she has observed. While the early modern mindset of the characters envisions this as a supernatural ability (some see her as a witch), Loupas allows the reader to understand it as a particularly refined psychological acuity, one that waxes and wanes with Rinette's own psychological health. As her circumstances become ever more threatening, Rinette's powers fail; distress renders her confused, unable to make sound judgments about people and their motivations. Rather than being the distraction I feared, Rinette's floromancy provides interesting glimpses into her own and other character's psyches and projects these insights onto the canvas of the novel in a vividly visual way.

THE FLOWER READER is a strongly plotted, well-written novel that evokes a believable sixteenth-century setting replete with details of period dress, food, architecture and manners. The characters are well-drawn, from Rinette, thrust into the world of politics when all she longs for is her daughters and her castle by the sea, to Nicolas de Clérac, the enigmatic, urbane hero who in many ways recalls Dorothy Dunnet's Lymond, to Mary, the high-spirited, impulsive and, yes, often times contrary young queen newly transplanted from France to Scotland. The novel builds suspense to a satisfying conclusion; fully engaged as I read, I was eager to discover how the pieces fit together (Loupas does some interesting things with Catherine de Medici's spy network, the infamous Esquadron volant). Second novels are often harder to write than debuts, for many reasons; Elizabeth Loupas acquits herself quite admirably in this one. I am glad I have not yet read her well-received first novel, THE SECOND DUCHESS, for now I don't have to wait until she writes a third to experience more of her superb storytelling.

THE FLOWER READER will be available on April 3, 2012. In the meantime, you can learn more about Elizabeth Loupas and her books at her website. Elizabeth will visit Writing the Renaissance in early April. Watch for her guest post!

Forthcoming Review

Coming on Monday... my review of Elizabeth Loupas's new novel, THE FLOWER READER, available from NAL on April 3. In sixteenth-century Scotland, Rinette Leslie, able to divine the future from flowers, must use both her gift and her wits to uncover her husband's murderer and protect young Mary, Queen of Scots, from treachery. "[T]he flowers are all she can trust, and only the flowers will lead her safely home..."

No need to de-petal a daisy over this one...you'll love it!