When Sweden gambled on a French general, it got 200 years of monarchy. When Alabama underestimated Abigail Howland, it got scorched earth.

I’ve played all my cards, and that’s what you’ve done too.

— ABBA, The Winner Takes It All

Parisa and I recently took a trip to Scandinavia—a few days in Copenhagen, a Swedish cruise, a train across Norway, and a solid amount of time marveling at how everything managed to be both efficient and cozy. While in Stockholm, the largest of the Nordic capitals, we joined a walking tour through Gamla Stan, the city’s old town. That part of Stockholm is especially stunning. The buildings look like pastel candy boxes, and the Swedes themselves are both impossibly beautiful and annoyingly well-dressed. As the tour wound through the cobblestone streets, we came across a statue right next to the Royal Palace of a man named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.

Now, I don’t claim to be a European history expert, but even I know “Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte” doesn’t sound particularly Swedish. And clearly, I wasn’t the first tourist to wonder why a French guy on a horse had such a prominent statue in the middle of Stockholm, because before I could say ursäkta mig, the guide stopped to tell us the tale. What followed was one of the most unexpected, wonderfully bizarre royal origin stories I’ve ever heard.

There’s not a soul out there / No one to hear my prayer.

–ABBA, Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)

Back in the early 1800s, Sweden was in a serious bind. They’d just lost Finland to Russia, their king had been overthrown, and the guy they installed in his place—Charles XIII—was elderly and childless, so not exactly brimming with heirs. With no viable successor and the monarchy teetering, the Swedish parliament did something bold, strange, and a little desperate: they offered the throne to a French general who was not only not royalty, but who also had never set foot in Sweden.

That general was Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, a career soldier who rose through the ranks during the French Revolution and fought alongside Napoleon who, we might recall, was definitely against monarchies. But he was no fool. When a country you’ve never visited offers you a crown, you don’t pause to debate political philosophy—you say yes. He converted to Lutheranism, took the name Karl Johan, and—against all odds—turned out to be exactly what Sweden needed. He led them through the Napoleonic wars, brought political stability, and founded the House of Bernadotte.

And here’s the kicker: not only did this French general do the job well, but his descendants have now ruled Sweden for over 200 years. The monarchy he was never meant to inherit? Still going strong. Still French. In fact, the only person in the current royal family with an actual Swedish bloodline is Prince Daniel—the guy who used to be a personal trainer before marrying Crown Princess Victoria. Which means that the Swedish crown is, to this day, balanced on the broad shoulders of a man who probably once taught a spin class.

Take a chance on me

–ABBA, Take a Chance on Me

A wise man once told me that “desperation breeds creativity,” and the phrase has stuck with me. Standing there in Stockholm, hearing how an orphaned monarchy took a wild gamble on a French revolutionary and somehow ended up with 200 years of peaceful succession, it struck me as an odd decision—but not a wrong one. It also made me think about another unlikely heir: Abigail Howland, the steely protagonist of The Keepers of the House, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1965. Her story isn’t about thrones or crowns, but it is about what you do when history hands you something heavy—and you decide to carry it anyway.

Written by Shirley Ann Grau, the book is set in rural Alabama and centers on the Howland family, landed Southern aristocrats who have run the same plantation for seven generations. On the surface, it’s a story about inheritance, race, and the slow decay of old money in the modern South. But underneath, it’s about what happens when long-held secrets come to light, when polite society turns on its own, and when the people you underestimated decide they’ve had enough.

The Howlands are a fixture in their small Southern town: wealthy, respected, and just aloof enough to be mythologized. William Howland, the family patriarch, is a quiet man who keeps to himself, raises his granddaughter Abigail after her parents die, and maintains the land with a kind of grim, inherited duty. He also, as it turns out, lives for decades in a secret common-law marriage with Margaret, a Black woman, and fathers several children with her. Those children are sent away and erased from polite white society, but not from the family’s bloodline.

Abigail grows up sheltered from the scandal. But when William dies and she inherits the estate, the past begins to surface. At first, the townspeople still treat her with the same reverent distance they afforded her grandfather. But once his secret is exposed—and once she’s seen as the white woman who inherited not just the house but the stain of racial mixing—everything changes. Her fiancé, a rising segregationist politician, abandons her for political expediency. Her social circle vanishes. The town turns on her, not with torches and pitchforks, but with lawsuits, whispers, and slow-motion ostracism.

And then Abigail flips the script.

There was something in the air that night, the stars were bright…

— ABBA, Fernando

Rather than retreat or collapse under the weight of shame and betrayal, she leans in. Hard. She becomes the keeper of the house in the truest sense: not just maintaining the family name, but wielding it like a weapon. She uses her resources, her name, and the town’s own rules of inheritance and land ownership to dismantle the social order that rejected her. It’s not a redemption arc. It’s a power play. Cold. Calculated. Viciously effective.

I’ve complained before about the lack of intentionality in some Pulitzer-winning protagonists. Take Daisy Goodwill from The Stone Diaries, for example, who drifts through life while others quietly shape her story. Abigail is the antidote. She doesn’t just reclaim the narrative; she owns the ending. There’s no soft fade into memory, no quiet elegy. Abigail stays rooted in the house, in the town, in the blood-soaked legacy she’s chosen to defend. If Daisy’s life is a collection of photographs someone else left unlabeled, Abigail’s is a hand-scrawled manifesto in Sharpie on the front porch wall.

That said, The Keepers of the House isn’t a perfect novel. It moves slowly at times, with long stretches of atmosphere that veer into over-description. The racial dynamics, while central to the plot, are sometimes handled with the kind of distance that feels more convenient than courageous. And the character development outside Abigail and William can feel thin—people drift in and out of the story like background extras. It’s a book with sharp bones, but not always enough flesh.

If we’re still using the Scorsese framework I proposed back when reviewing Martin Dressler, this one probably lands in the Casino tier. Flawed, a little bloated, maybe not his best—but when it hits, it really hits. And like Casino, its final act is a ruthless, unexpected coda that lingers long after you close the book.

The history book on the shelf / Is always repeating itself.

— ABBA, Waterloo

But beyond structure or style, what lingers is the shape of the story—and who dares to shape it. Because that’s what these stories—Bernadotte’s, Abigail’s—are really about. The unexpected turns. The side doors. The idea that history isn’t always written by the boldest or the best prepared—but by the ones who said yes when no one else wanted the job. Whether it’s a French general grabbing a crown, or a Southern woman reclaiming a poisoned inheritance, the lesson is the same: desperation doesn’t just breed creativity—it sometimes creates legacies. Messy ones. Contested ones. But legacies nonetheless.

Sometimes the story isn’t passed down. It’s taken back.