Reviews

The Butcher's Daughter by Victoria Glendinning

anyakinsl's review

5.0

A wonderful travel through England during the reign of Henry the Eighth. Our protagonist is a young woman named Agnes who finds herself an outlier in that although the daughter of a butcher, she yearns for more than a family and home, she wants to read and be free. We follow her journeys from her home to an Abbey where she is a novice and then after the dissolution of the abbeys by Henry the Eighth, around the countryside in England. I was absolutely transported. The descriptions and imagery in this book were wonderful and I could imagine every moment in minute detail. This book should be required reading when taking world history classes because it outlines how the changes in politics had their tolls on the common people. I found no flaws in this book and it appeared to be very meticulously researched as well.
This book was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

kleonard's review

1.0

The premise--what happens to the nuns when Henry VIII closes the monasteries and abbeys--is a good one. But the book is dull and pedestrian, peopled by dim and shallowly created characters, narrated by a young woman who upon leaving her abbey goes on a Forrest Gump-like journey through the period's famous figures and places.