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A review by the_local_dialect
The Land Beyond the Sea by Sharon Kay Penman
5.0
I have never read a Penman book that I didn't love, and this was no exception. It brought me to tears several times, something that Penman has never failed to do! Of course, like all Penman books, this was meticulously researched and as much as I enjoyed the story, I learned just as much about the crusader kingdoms of Outremer and their eventual defeat at the hands of Saladin's armies.
Although the presence of the crusader kingdoms in the Middle East was problematic in and of itself, Penman took pains never to present the Franks as the "good guys" and the Islamic sultanates as the "bad guys." If anything, there are several Franks who inspire much more hatred. At the same time, Penman's protagonists are the Franks, and so of course the story is told from their point of view, but Penman does not make any moral judgments about who is right and who is wrong. Whether the Franks had a right to be there or not, by 1187 generations of Poulains had made their lives and homes in the levant and clearly losing that home was a sad and tragic thing for them, something that even Saladin seemed to recognize. She mentions several times that Saladin was actually more merciful to the Franks who surrendered than the crusaders who took Jerusalem in the first place had been to the Muslim inhabitants. This is all to say, I think that Penman handles a tricky subject very deftly. We feel for our protagonists, but at the end of the day the "bad guys" are the inept leaders who led them to defeat, not Saladin and his armies.
Although the presence of the crusader kingdoms in the Middle East was problematic in and of itself, Penman took pains never to present the Franks as the "good guys" and the Islamic sultanates as the "bad guys." If anything, there are several Franks who inspire much more hatred. At the same time, Penman's protagonists are the Franks, and so of course the story is told from their point of view, but Penman does not make any moral judgments about who is right and who is wrong. Whether the Franks had a right to be there or not, by 1187 generations of Poulains had made their lives and homes in the levant and clearly losing that home was a sad and tragic thing for them, something that even Saladin seemed to recognize. She mentions several times that Saladin was actually more merciful to the Franks who surrendered than the crusaders who took Jerusalem in the first place had been to the Muslim inhabitants. This is all to say, I think that Penman handles a tricky subject very deftly. We feel for our protagonists, but at the end of the day the "bad guys" are the inept leaders who led them to defeat, not Saladin and his armies.