Genevieve Valentine reviews "The Queen's Embroiderer" for NPR: The brief introductory note to this book suggests she ran into a needle-scratch moment in the middle of more conventional research: Jean Magoulet's appointment as the Queen's Embroiderer, alongside a 1719 royal decree that his daughter Marie Louise be arrested and shipped to Louisiana. That was undoubtedly a surprising fate for the daughter of a royal appointee.
Then she found out Jean Magoulet had made the request himself. Given the nature of the family, the story is often so dour that sometimes only the historical minutiae keep you going.
But The Queen's Embroiderer lives largely in the place where petty men desperate to make themselves palatable to those in power poison their own family relationships, leverage a broken legal and government system, and leave a trail of trauma and destruction in their wake; a long shadow indeed.
see also author's page @ Simon & Schuster
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