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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
I had been slugging through some Phillipa Gregory, but this one re-ignited my interest. Well written with a good balance of fact and fictional speculation. They wet the appetite for history.
The White Queen was a very good read. I enjoy historical fiction and know it's a good book when I want to continue researching the subject. I was sucked in from the first chapter. I have already gotten the 2nd book to the series and look forward to knowing more about these people. I love books that bring history to life!
I loved "The Other Boelyn Girl" and "The Queen's Fool" - naturally I thought I would enjoy this book. I really felt nothing towards any of the characters. The names were confusing, and the dialogue repetitive. "I say," "He says," etc. does not make a good dialogue scene and gets old quickly. Her son shares her husband's name, to avoid any confusion she just calls him "Baby..." seriously? There was a good 30 pages or so where I was started to get into it, then I made it about halfway and decided to call it. I could have cared less about any of the characters, the plot was trudging along, and I was getting annoyed by many characters sharing the same name. Other reviewers really hit the nail on the head for me- it just did not catch my interest.
Very hard to settle into this book. About halfway through it started picking up for me. Not as good as the books about the Tudor family.
This book had such potential, but the author lost me with all the witchcraft references. I was really interested in reading the entire series, but my opinion has changed since reading this first book.
This was my first book by the author. She's an historian, and did plenty of research for this book, so I feel that it was an easy and fun way to learn a bit about English history during the time of the War of the Roses. It's a lot more fun than a history book, very dramatic and a bit of a page turner near the end. I had some trouble keeping track of who was who. There are at least three characters named Elizabeth, at least four named Henry, and the Queen (Elizabeth) has two sons named Richard. Everytime she accuses Richard (uncle and usurper king, not her son) of killing her son and her brother, I have to think hard, "What son? What brother?" She has at least 11 children, and about that many siblings as well. When she's not birthing babies, she's conjuring magic spells and trying to hang on to power. I'll probably read the next book in the series.
I think the oddest part of this book, for me, is how quickly it skips past events. Gregory has always taken her time and told her stories in great detail; it's one the best things about her writing because even though she takes her liberties, you still feel like you get the essence of the time period and its people. I understand that this is a little further back in history than her Tudor novels and there is less concrete evidence/writings for her to go off of, but the years she's delving into with the War of Cousins is arguably more action-packed than the Tudor novels because it's actual battle and back and forth rather than just politics, and we get so little of it. I suppose this is also partially because her novels focus on the women, who wouldn't have been in the forefront of the actual action, but especially here, Gregory shows she doesn't mind dipping into the voice of other characters. Perhaps this story should've been more equally split between Elizabeth and Edward, or her brother Anthony.
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Reread. I first read this book when it came out around 2010. It was probably the thing that kicked off my interest in the English Royals. It's important to mention that, I think, because Gregory gets a lot of flack for presenting things as fact that in reality are very unlikely to be true (or in the case of some, definitely aren't true) and, yeah, if this was a non-fiction book presenting the Woodville family relationship to magic or Perkin Warbeck as being Richard smuggled out of the tower and replaced with someone else, etc as facts, that would be bad. This, however, is fiction, meant to be a good story, not an accounting of actual events. It's fun to play with history and imagine "what would have happened if" and a good storyteller can get people interested enough to read non fiction and learn the truth (hopefully).
And now that I've defended myself for enjoying her work, I will say it holds up on reread and is, at least to me, even more enjoyable to read when I know the real history. I can better catch foreshadowing and winking references that completely went over my head the first time. Parts that I felt dragged the first time made a lot more sense to me as well and I was able to keep the innumerable Elizabeths, Edwards, Richards, etc straight in my head.
The drawback, as always, is that Elizabeth W is a pretty passive character despite her somewhat cutthroat ambitions and it can be hard to write a story about someone who, despite being queen, doesn't have much say in events (which is probably why the witchcraft elements were added: the rumours were real and making it true does give her some additional agency) but she still fascinates me and I would read any book about her.
I love a good story and this was one. The English are so predictable and unpredictable at the same time.
This was about women, strong women, who controlled the kingdom and everything that happened in it from their private chambers.
I do not like how it ended, it was too sudden. And because I was not expect it to end like that, I did not like it. It was too sudden. But the story as a whole was great
This was about women, strong women, who controlled the kingdom and everything that happened in it from their private chambers.
I do not like how it ended, it was too sudden. And because I was not expect it to end like that, I did not like it. It was too sudden. But the story as a whole was great
Loved it! Haven't read historical fiction in awhile. Very sad chapter about the death of her toddler son..hit a little close to home and had to go in and interrupt naptime to go kiss my skinny, blonde, blue-eyed toddler:)