georgiaswad 's review for:

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

4.0

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this was honestly so enjoyable. i very rarely delve into historical fiction, especially of this time period, and embarrassingly my knowledge of the tudors is limited to what i can remember from year 9 history (divorced, beheaded, died…) so this was an exercise in dredging up my memories of who exactly thomas cromwell was again. that said hilary mantel did a fantastic job of settling me into her setting, her characters felt realistically placed but recognisably human and relatable despite living nearly 500 years in the past. i understand the gripes people have had over the confusing pronoun use or grammatical choices but this wasn’t massively off putting for me (probably because i’ve read and enjoyed many books that are WAY weirder stylistically) and i actually found the occasional vague confusion somewhat charming; it exacerbated my feeling that i was a fly on the wall in a foreign time and the action playing out before me was not crafted for my entertainment but taking place in actuality while i tried my best to keep up. the dialogue and cromwell’s internal monologue was also at times really genuinely funny, even within such a serious landscape. 

i also liked how key figures are not given undue precedence because of what roles they will grow into at a later time, we’re aware of their importance because of our historical knowledge, but within the text they are a product of their time, no more important yet than they believe themselves to be (jane seymour is a good example).

honestly really genuinely enjoyable, i will definitely work my way through the rest of the trilogy at some point but i think i’ll be pretty devastated to lose cromwell as a narrator when the time comes.