1-minute Review: The Mad Women’s Ball by Victoria Mas

Scenes, moods and thoughts are encased in succinct and sophisticated narrative. Set in historical Paris and partly based on shocking events related to mental health. With a sprinkling of paranormal feeding the moody atmosphere, this is a novel you won’t regret reading. Also now a movie. Thought-provoking whilst still lightly entertaining.

My Full Take

I have to say it straight away — this book is very well written. Victoria Mas is an absolute expert at summoning only a few words to set the scene, the tone or the mood. She can paint an entire moment in a single sentence and immerse you so magically that you feel the damp stone walls of the asylum and the heavy air of 1885 Paris around you.

The book is perfectly paced. Nothing drags, nothing rushes. It moves with a quiet confidence that keeps you turning pages while still giving you space to feel the eerie, slightly supernatural events that drift through the story. Those ghostly moments left me wondering the whole time: are they real, or is it all in the characters’ minds? That uncertainty is delicious.

The Shocking Twist – It’s All Based on Real History What really floored me is the reveal that the central event — the Mad Women’s Ball itself — actually happened. Every year during Lent at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, the “hysterical” women patients were dressed up in costumes and paraded in front of Parisian high society. Doctors, aristocrats and the curious elite came to watch them dance, flirt and perform. It was sold as entertainment and medical demonstration, but it was really a cruel spectacle. Victoria Mas didn’t invent the ball — she took a real, shocking piece of history and wove her story around it. That knowledge hits you like a gut punch once you finish and realise how little fiction was needed.

Main Characters & Plot We follow three women whose lives collide inside the grim walls of the Salpêtrière asylum.

At the heart is Eugénie Cléry, a bright, outspoken 19-year-old from a bourgeois family. She has a secret: she sees spirits of the dead. When she dares to speak about it, her own father has her committed — because in 1885, a woman who refuses to stay quiet or “proper” is quickly labelled mad.

Then there’s Geneviève, the senior nurse who has worked at the hospital for years. She once believed wholeheartedly in science and Dr Charcot’s methods… until Eugénie makes her question everything.

And we also spend time with the other patients — women like the flamboyant Thérèse and the fragile Louise — who have been locked away for all the “wrong” reasons: grief, poverty, disobedience, or simply being inconvenient to the men in their lives.

The plot builds quietly but relentlessly toward the night of the famous Mad Women’s Ball. Without spoiling anything, I’ll just say the tension simmers beautifully as Eugénie and Geneviève form an unlikely alliance, and the reader is pulled deeper into the cruelty, the sisterhood, and the quiet acts of defiance inside the asylum.