In the 17th century, hundreds of girls and women were sent from France – often against their will – to populate the New World. But little is known of these filles du roi, as they were dubbed, and they left almost nothing behind in the way of stories or documents of their experience. In her debut novel, Ontario-born Suzanne Desrochers weaves together history and fiction to dramatize the life of one imagined fille du roi, Laure Beausejour....Desrochers’ descriptions are vivid and unforgiving; any romantic notions the reader may harbour about pre-revolutionary Paris disappear...Desrocher’s portrayal of her characters is sympathetic, despite their obvious flaws...Laure’s story weighs heavily on the reader, but in her, Desrochers has given history’s silent filles du roi a voice

The 17th century in France and New France presented huge challenges for women, especially women with no money or status. In Bride of New France, Suzanne Desrochers delineates those challenges for Laure, the main character in this historical novel....
Desrochers brings to life the dismal conditions under which the girls laboured..
Desrochers seems to heap on the difficulties for Laure, and the New France part is less engaging than the Old France part.

But both give an excellent look at the struggles for existence and the struggle for meaning in what can be a terrifying life.

. Never has such familiar lint been picked to greater effect than in Bride of New France, by Susan Desrochers, a trained historian who has boldly appropriated fiction to expand a vision of life gleaned from painstaking study of often overlooked evidence....As a graduate student at Toronto’s York University, Desrochers chose to study the well-known but little-investigated story of the filles du roi, women of uncertain origin exported by royal decree into the faltering, almost wholly male colony in the late 17th century to serve as breeding stock for a new European population. Over the course of some virtuous process, her thesis blossomed into a fully imagined but deeply grounded novel about Laure Beausejour, the fictionalized daughter of Parisian street people who is swept up by police and incarcerated for years in the nightmarish Salpêtrière Hospital, a prison housing thousands of indigent, ill and insane women, before resigning herself to an even more appalling fate: exile in Canada....As much as her feeling for Laure and her companions gives the book heart, professional discipline keeps it real. It is a powerful combination.

Bride of New France will not silence critics of the new social history, nor is it meant to. But if they do want to bring the past alive for a new generation, as they typically claim, they could never find a text more likely to engage the minds and imaginations of young people, especially girls, who have grown immune to the conventional narratives