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herbalmoon's review against another edition
1.0
You know what the middle grade series "The Royal Diaries" did right? There was a narrative within the diary entries, which meant there was a "mental movie" I could watch.
You know what this book did wrong? Eleanor was just repeating information from her life and her imprisonment. I read a few pages, flipped forward and realized there wasn't going to be a movie, it was just going to be a lecture. And I don't read books for lectures.
I didn't even make it past the first chapter. Her Wikipedia page was more interesting.
You know what this book did wrong? Eleanor was just repeating information from her life and her imprisonment. I read a few pages, flipped forward and realized there wasn't going to be a movie, it was just going to be a lecture. And I don't read books for lectures.
I didn't even make it past the first chapter. Her Wikipedia page was more interesting.
dhintz2's review against another edition
4.0
Love anything Tony Riches writes, and of course, he knocked it out of the park again.
lisa_setepenre's review against another edition
2.0
The Secret Diary of Eleanor Cobham is perhaps best summed up as being limited by its chosen format. It’s hard to make a diary work successfully as a novel. For a start, the tension is undercut by the fact that the reader knows that the “author” has to have survived to write down what’s happened, and the real author has to write spectacularly enough for the reader to overlook that.
Tony Riches, sadly, doesn’t, and he undercuts the tension even more by having the diary being written during Eleanor’s captivity, so even a reader unfamiliar with Eleanor’s story already knows how her story ends. I really think the book would have been better if Eleanor had written her diary as events happened, so the reader finds out things with her. That said, there are ways to raise the tension even without changing the structure so drastically. For example, developing the characters around Eleanor would mean the reader also gets invested in them and cares when they are imperilled. Or perhaps not telling us what happened to them within the first few chapters. Riches could even made use of the conceit that this is a real historical object that he discovered and decoded, (which is only found in the book description, not in the actual text) to interrupt Eleanor’s narrative and create tension that way – what if the diary cuts off abruptly and the decoder has to investigate to find out what happened to her?
There are more flaws with the diary format to be found as well. There is no strict chronology and a chapter might include events from multiple timelines. I’m not just talking about pairing the framing device of Eleanor’s diary-writing in captivity with a chronological recollection of the past. The timeline is really muddled, with Eleanor sometimes jumping from the distant past to the present to the not-so-distant past and everything in between, which means it can be hard to keep track of events. Additionally, Eleanor’s recollections of her past often came across as rather dry – as I said in a status update, it’s probably a bad thing that the part of the narrative I’m most invested in are the sections of Eleanor dealing with her captivity, not what led her to becoming a captive.
It might be true that these things might reflect how someone might write a diary – a muddled timeline, an undramatic retelling of dramatic events – but it doesn’t make for a great fiction novel. By the midpoint I was struggling to care, and I only bought the book because I was already invested in the historical Eleanor.
Furthermore, I feel like the book is weighted down by the information is trying to convey. There is a lot of paragraphs where Eleanor explains things to the reader, even to the extent that when a character is mentioned for the first time, Eleanor immediately explains who he is and what his precise relationship with her husband is and why she felt like she could or couldn’t approach them. Early chapters felt like Riches was trying to get as much information on the page as possible, without wondering whether it would feel genuine for Eleanor to give an information dump in a diary.
But even setting aside the issues with the format, I found myself frustrated. The characters outside of Eleanor were held at a distance and I often got the feeling that they stopped existing, both for Eleanor and as of themselves, the moment Eleanor’s story was done with them. A character such as Humphrey, Eleanor’s one time husband and the Duke of Gloucester, is indecipherable. There are hints of complexity and frailty about his character, but I would struggle to say why Eleanor loved him or anything strong about his character. And this is a character who should be a major supporting character, a character she would have known extremely well. We get told about the Battle of Agincourt, obstinately based on what he told Eleanor about it, but apart from a few little comments, it’s a largely dry, brief recollection that you might find in a history book, more concerned with getting the details right than conveying the story of the battle. Honestly, I would rather not have it at all than have such a lifeless retelling that, again, hinted at complexity (please tell me more about Humphrey being mentally scarred by his brush with death!) but didn’t draw it out in any meaningful way.
But even Eleanor herself isn’t well-characterised. I think we’re meant to see her as rather naïve and a wronged victim but I really lacked a sense of who she was. Some aspects of her character seemed weird – I really doubt, for instance, that she knew instantly that she and Humphrey would be lovers the very first time she saw him.
I caught a couple of typos and some historical goofs (no, Henry V did not have his infant son brought to him in France; he never saw his son). Historically, the mother of Humphrey’s two illegitimate children, Arthur and Antigone, is unknown – Riches goes for the easiest option by having Eleanor be their mother and personally I think this is doubtful (Why would Humphrey not have them legitimised when he married Eleanor? His grandfather had previously legitimised his bastard children with Katherine Swynford when he married her so obviously it could be done), but the notes at the end do explain why Riches went for that option.
There are things to enjoy about this book. I really enjoyed that this didn’t repeat the bog-standard narrative of Eleanor as a shameless, slutty commoner who was undone by her ambition and vanity, turning to witchcraft to seek the death of the king so she might become queen. Riches’s interpretation is that she was of noble birth, that she married Humphrey because she was in love with him and that while she did dabble in the occult, it was for relatively innocent purposes and she never sought the king’s death.
I found the sections of the book dealing with Eleanor’s captivity quite compelling and well-written, having a sense of immediacy that Eleanor’s recollections did not. I also liked the detail of having Eleanor witness preludes to the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, though I wonder if a reader unfamiliar with the context would really get much out of them.
The fact that no characters (with the possible exception of Cardinal Henry Beaufort, presented as Eleanor and Humphrey’s archenemy, which isn’t far off the mark) were demonised is also to be commended. I enjoyed that the potential love triangle between Eleanor, Humphrey and his first wife, Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault, was never a catfight between the two women over the man and Jacqueline was characterised sympathetically.
But while that is all well and good, and, unlike some novels I’ve read that featured Eleanor or Humphrey, didn’t make me shriek in rage, it does not guarantee a great read and this where I felt the book let me down. I started reading pre-invested in Eleanor and yet, by the halfway point, I was bored of her story, let down by her dull recollections of her past, by the lack of tension and underdeveloped characters. 2 stars.
Tony Riches, sadly, doesn’t, and he undercuts the tension even more by having the diary being written during Eleanor’s captivity, so even a reader unfamiliar with Eleanor’s story already knows how her story ends. I really think the book would have been better if Eleanor had written her diary as events happened, so the reader finds out things with her. That said, there are ways to raise the tension even without changing the structure so drastically. For example, developing the characters around Eleanor would mean the reader also gets invested in them and cares when they are imperilled. Or perhaps not telling us what happened to them within the first few chapters. Riches could even made use of the conceit that this is a real historical object that he discovered and decoded, (which is only found in the book description, not in the actual text) to interrupt Eleanor’s narrative and create tension that way – what if the diary cuts off abruptly and the decoder has to investigate to find out what happened to her?
There are more flaws with the diary format to be found as well. There is no strict chronology and a chapter might include events from multiple timelines. I’m not just talking about pairing the framing device of Eleanor’s diary-writing in captivity with a chronological recollection of the past. The timeline is really muddled, with Eleanor sometimes jumping from the distant past to the present to the not-so-distant past and everything in between, which means it can be hard to keep track of events. Additionally, Eleanor’s recollections of her past often came across as rather dry – as I said in a status update, it’s probably a bad thing that the part of the narrative I’m most invested in are the sections of Eleanor dealing with her captivity, not what led her to becoming a captive.
It might be true that these things might reflect how someone might write a diary – a muddled timeline, an undramatic retelling of dramatic events – but it doesn’t make for a great fiction novel. By the midpoint I was struggling to care, and I only bought the book because I was already invested in the historical Eleanor.
Furthermore, I feel like the book is weighted down by the information is trying to convey. There is a lot of paragraphs where Eleanor explains things to the reader, even to the extent that when a character is mentioned for the first time, Eleanor immediately explains who he is and what his precise relationship with her husband is and why she felt like she could or couldn’t approach them. Early chapters felt like Riches was trying to get as much information on the page as possible, without wondering whether it would feel genuine for Eleanor to give an information dump in a diary.
But even setting aside the issues with the format, I found myself frustrated. The characters outside of Eleanor were held at a distance and I often got the feeling that they stopped existing, both for Eleanor and as of themselves, the moment Eleanor’s story was done with them. A character such as Humphrey, Eleanor’s one time husband and the Duke of Gloucester, is indecipherable. There are hints of complexity and frailty about his character, but I would struggle to say why Eleanor loved him or anything strong about his character. And this is a character who should be a major supporting character, a character she would have known extremely well. We get told about the Battle of Agincourt, obstinately based on what he told Eleanor about it, but apart from a few little comments, it’s a largely dry, brief recollection that you might find in a history book, more concerned with getting the details right than conveying the story of the battle. Honestly, I would rather not have it at all than have such a lifeless retelling that, again, hinted at complexity (please tell me more about Humphrey being mentally scarred by his brush with death!) but didn’t draw it out in any meaningful way.
But even Eleanor herself isn’t well-characterised. I think we’re meant to see her as rather naïve and a wronged victim but I really lacked a sense of who she was. Some aspects of her character seemed weird – I really doubt, for instance, that she knew instantly that she and Humphrey would be lovers the very first time she saw him.
I caught a couple of typos and some historical goofs (no, Henry V did not have his infant son brought to him in France; he never saw his son). Historically, the mother of Humphrey’s two illegitimate children, Arthur and Antigone, is unknown – Riches goes for the easiest option by having Eleanor be their mother and personally I think this is doubtful (Why would Humphrey not have them legitimised when he married Eleanor? His grandfather had previously legitimised his bastard children with Katherine Swynford when he married her so obviously it could be done), but the notes at the end do explain why Riches went for that option.
There are things to enjoy about this book. I really enjoyed that this didn’t repeat the bog-standard narrative of Eleanor as a shameless, slutty commoner who was undone by her ambition and vanity, turning to witchcraft to seek the death of the king so she might become queen. Riches’s interpretation is that she was of noble birth, that she married Humphrey because she was in love with him and that while she did dabble in the occult, it was for relatively innocent purposes and she never sought the king’s death.
I found the sections of the book dealing with Eleanor’s captivity quite compelling and well-written, having a sense of immediacy that Eleanor’s recollections did not. I also liked the detail of having Eleanor witness preludes to the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, though I wonder if a reader unfamiliar with the context would really get much out of them.
The fact that no characters (with the possible exception of Cardinal Henry Beaufort, presented as Eleanor and Humphrey’s archenemy, which isn’t far off the mark) were demonised is also to be commended. I enjoyed that the potential love triangle between Eleanor, Humphrey and his first wife, Jacqueline, Countess of Hainault, was never a catfight between the two women over the man and Jacqueline was characterised sympathetically.
But while that is all well and good, and, unlike some novels I’ve read that featured Eleanor or Humphrey, didn’t make me shriek in rage, it does not guarantee a great read and this where I felt the book let me down. I started reading pre-invested in Eleanor and yet, by the halfway point, I was bored of her story, let down by her dull recollections of her past, by the lack of tension and underdeveloped characters. 2 stars.