Equally difficult to swallow is the heavy-handed plot, which relies on jarring coincidences as it swerves unsteadily from past to present. Chevalier tries hard to make Ella sympathetic, but her dissatisfaction with Rick is baffling, as is her attraction to the chauvinistic Jean-Paul. Ella, with the help of magnetic local librarian Jean-Paul, researches the lives of Isabelle and Etienne, trying to get to the bottom of her strange dreams.

Because of her own red hair and midwifery practice, Isabelle is suspected by her husband of witchcraft and punished accordingly. Isabelle and Etienne belong to a vehemently anti-Catholic Calvinist sect that overthrows the village's cult of the Virgin, who is also known as La Rousse and depicted in paintings as red-haired and wearing a blue dress. In alternating sections of the novel, these details are developed in a narrative about a 16th-century French farm girl and midwife, Isabelle du Moulin, and her eventual marriage to overbearing tyrant Etienne Tournier. Often left alone, she becomes lonely and isolated, and when she decides it's time to have a baby, she begins dreaming of medieval scenes involving a blue dress. Her architect husband, Rick, has been transferred from California to Toulouse, France, with Ella accompanying him. The primary plot concerns the plight of Ella Turner, an insecure American midwife of French ancestry. In split-narrative fashion, it follows a transplanted American woman in southwestern France as she connects through dreams with her distant Huguenot ancestors.

And the power of bloodlines.I have two other Chevalier novels already, and I look forward to reading them.Chevalier's clunky first novel, initially published in England in 1997, lacks the graceful literary intimacy of her subsequent runaway hit, Girl with a Pearl Earring. I am willing to admit that people who belonged together in the past being reunited in the present is a very attractive and romantic premise that I would like to think is possible. In the big picture, I did really enjoy the mysterious connection of the past and the present, and I especially liked the pacing of the short passages back forth at the climax of Isabelle's story and Ella's discovery of the evidence. In the historical parts, I have read other authors who would have spent more time explaining the religious conflict, both in the historical context and within the interplay of the characters themselves. She seemed in some ways the stereotype of the ugly American, despite all her efforts and desires to fit in. Ella was really very whiney at the start. The premise and the story were interesting, but I have to admit I found the present day characters more difficult to enjoy than the 16th century ones.

Issues sounds bad and I don't mean it that way. I suppose I really mean 3.5 as there are a couple of issues that kept me from going to 4.

The Virgin Blue by Tracy Chevalier