A review by ravenbait
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

3.0

It took me a long while to get into this work, largely because of the linguistic structure. It read for me as if Mantel had written it initially in the first person, and then performed a find-replace on all the first person pronouns and verb forms to make them third person instead without changing the text itself. The ambiguity this caused was so distracting I didn't start to enjoy the book until two thirds of the way through, by which time the characters (of which there are a lot) were well enough established I could easily work out who was speaking from what they were saying.

That said, I did find the setting ably painted, the characters very well brought to life, the politics interesting. It's not a period of history with which I am overly familiar, so I wasn't diverted at any point by historical accuracy or otherwise.