Researching a story opens up a whole new world—especially when another country and time period are involved. For our novel My Brother’s Crown, we stepped back into seventeenth-century France and found ourselves enlightened, to say the least.
Our subject was the group of French Calvinists known as Huguenots. We knew they’d been persecuted for their faith, but it wasn’t until we jumped into the research that we realized the extent of their displacement by the French crown and the impact on our world of that time.
Here are a few fascinating facts that we uncovered during our research:
As we worked on this story of a family of Huguenot refugees and their modern-day descendants, we couldn’t help but think of the current refugee situation. According to António Guterres, head of the UN’s refugee agency, “We are witnessing a quantum leap in forced displacement in the world.” As of 2013 there were 51.2 million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people. Sadly their numbers have only grown larger in the last two years.
Unfortunately, the plight facing displaced people is a timeless story. We hope as countries respond to the current situation that the latest wave of refugees will find safety and refuge for their families—just as the Huguenots did more than 300 years ago.
See Mindy and Leslie's research come to life in My Brother's Crown.
