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A review by lassarina
The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick
3.0
I love Eleanor of Aquitaine but I knew relatively little of her early life, and this book lays it out in intense detail. (Perhaps, in some ways, a little bit too much detail - this is a long book, 512 pages according to Amazon, and sometimes I felt like the thread was drifting. In fact, I got distracted early on and read another book in between starting and finishing this, although that might just be me.) The book treats Eleanor more as a woman who was clever in maneuvering within the constraints of her time, than as a woman who ran roughshod over said constraints, as she is often depicted in modern writing. It's hard to say which one is accurate; there's probably a bit of both.
Some of the details that really made this book come alive to me were the bits where the time period is vastly different from our own--how dangerous even a simple cold can be, the absolute permeation of faith, a world without central heat/air conditioning, the pace and difficulty of travel. I liked the explanations of food and the way the politics worked. That said, I felt like really only a few people felt like they were real, versus historical cutouts moving around as required for the progression of the (predetermined by history) story. Perhaps that's just a facet of the genre, with which I do not have much experience.
Some of the details that really made this book come alive to me were the bits where the time period is vastly different from our own--how dangerous even a simple cold can be, the absolute permeation of faith, a world without central heat/air conditioning, the pace and difficulty of travel. I liked the explanations of food and the way the politics worked. That said, I felt like really only a few people felt like they were real, versus historical cutouts moving around as required for the progression of the (predetermined by history) story. Perhaps that's just a facet of the genre, with which I do not have much experience.