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A review by shipcourt
Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France by Leonie Frieda
2.0
I'm giving the book 2 stars because I did learn a lot, but overall there were too many things that made it a bit of a slog to get through.
From a technical standpoint, the long, awkwardly structured sentences, coupled with a lack of commas/semi-colons/the word "and" when they were sorely needed, made it necessary for me to have to re-read them in order to understand. At other times, it was unclear to which person the author was referring, as pronouns would be used instead of names when there were multiple people mentioned in a preceding sentence, or words like "the king" when the author had just mentioned three kings, for example.
I also felt that, given that the book is a biography rather than a general history, it went into too much detail about battles and other events (e.g. an entire chapter devoted to describing a two-year tour of France), as well as Catherine's sons' time spent as kings. There were also long and tedious descriptions of festivities (weddings, coronations, processions, etc.), as well as objects like clothing, accessories, buildings, props used in the aforementioned festivities, and so on.
From a technical standpoint, the long, awkwardly structured sentences, coupled with a lack of commas/semi-colons/the word "and" when they were sorely needed, made it necessary for me to have to re-read them in order to understand. At other times, it was unclear to which person the author was referring, as pronouns would be used instead of names when there were multiple people mentioned in a preceding sentence, or words like "the king" when the author had just mentioned three kings, for example.
I also felt that, given that the book is a biography rather than a general history, it went into too much detail about battles and other events (e.g. an entire chapter devoted to describing a two-year tour of France), as well as Catherine's sons' time spent as kings. There were also long and tedious descriptions of festivities (weddings, coronations, processions, etc.), as well as objects like clothing, accessories, buildings, props used in the aforementioned festivities, and so on.