Riveting and effervescent ... Empty Theatre, its titular metaphor speaking to the isolation behind the pomp, is called a novel, reads like a fairy tale, but is at its heart a biography ... Modern and mythic, Empty Theatre captures the outrageous taste of an era while measuring the steep costs of our dream worlds.

Throughout the book, she seems to waver: Is she writing a tragicomic confection, à la Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette, or something trickier—a biographical novel virtually devoid of interiority, narrated by the panoramic voice of Fate? ... The approach Jemc settles on is a middle path between satire and family drama, although it’s hard to satirize figures who were, from birth, already caricatures of cloistered, bored, wanton nobility. Symbolism becomes overripe ... Occasional anachronisms—small and large—deflate the pomp of Jemc’s imagined world ... The history in Empty Theatre isn’t so much revisionist as retrofitted. It’s a narrative strategy that falters only near the end ... The tone sterilizes some of the bombast and madness of the preceding four hundred–plus pages, squeezing Ludwig’s singularity into a familiar, four-cornered emotion like loneliness. Here, perhaps, is what fiction offers that conventional biography doesn’t: a nugget of moralizing psychology in lieu of a denouement. Still, as a story of royals behaving badly and bemoaning their privilege, Empty Theatre has impeccable timing. Such stories have never gone out of fashion. They even used to be interesting.

Immediately enthralling ... A lengthy book by most measures, Jemc’s propulsive pacing, evocative concision, and the episodic structure make for quick reading. But the rapturous recounting of these fated characters’ lives will buzz for some time in readers’ minds.

Lively ... Her episodic style gives the novel a brisk, impressionistic air but sacrifices some of the immersive qualities of historical fiction and necessitates the occasional dry summary ... Nonetheless, Jemc seldom lacks for brio in portraying these inscrutable figures weighed down by their crowns and visions. The originality on offer is well worth the price of admission.

Sensual, intricate, and filled with the verve of its own opulent language, Jemc’s retelling of these apocryphal lives delivers all the urgency of their time into our own without losing any of the fidelity it owes to their real legacies ... This novel is a triumph.