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clairesreading 's review for:
The Confessions of Catherine de Medici
by C.W. Gortner
I wish I could give it 0 stars.
This book was bland, historically inaccurate, weirdly obsessed with the color of its teenage protagonists nipples, horribly paced, chaotic to follow and overall less enjoyable than any historical fiction that I have ever read. Even the books I DNF were more enjoyable and better written than this.
I powered through it in two days just because this book felt like a curse I could only break if I finished it then threw it away.
I really didn't like this book for several reasons:
1) It just wasn't gripping, good, or anything at all. I could barely understand what was going on most of the time, and it felt like 99% of the time it was only a copy paste of wikipedia done by a highschool student who'd skip paragraphs and take out names to make it look shorter.
2) Historical accuracy: I have almost no words. The author took MANY liberties, but worst of all, changed names and deleted characters to "make it easier" to follow the story, which did not work at all, let me tell you.
3) Some of the inventions had no use. Catherine de Medici is suddenly hot for her father-in-law and then 10 pages later mourns him as "the father she never had"? Really?
4) This is a typical "woman and her sex life written by a man". Have I read smut? yes. Do I dislike books for having graphic sex scenes? Nop. But this book was incredibly off in the way it approaches the sexual life of its teenage protagonist.
5) Confusing timeline. By page 80 she's been in France for 7 years but the description barely accounts for it. Pregnancies are skipped over, she is pregnant with her third one page and then 3 pages later she's about to give birth to the fourth, without concrete indication of the time passing.
6) The editing mistakes were the cherry on top. You write a historically inaccurate fiction, fine, you make it as boring as possible with no real appeal to the writing, fine. But you can't bother checking for typos?
7) The point of making Catherine a seer, putting it in the book description like a huge plot point, starting the book with it...and then we have maybe 4-5 prophecies where she basically "knows" a character is dead and then goes to check or is told of the death a few seconds later? There wasn't even a point in terms of it showing you other POVs so that you wouldn't be limited by the main character's limited mobility. It felt like such a weird detail that would pop off here and there.
8) The author couldn't bother finding a probable cause for Catherine's motives, so he decided that she was having a torrid love affair with one of the heretics, because, reasons?
9) I don't know if the author knows how to describe feelings, but the character felt like a piece of cardboard.
But my biggest issue with the book comes from the first half.
Why the author decided to be hyper descriptive of the body and sexual acts of the protagonist when she is 15 but not when she has a lover in her 40s is beyond me. The words spread eagle, silky breasts or dress stuck between my buttox feel less like a sensual description than some pleasure jn describing a woman’s humiliation and lack of control over what is done to her body.
I find it hard to believe describing the colour of the 15 yo protagonists nipple to be either historically needed or part of the character development description or novel ambiance
I am tired of men writing women in historical fiction by such lurid details, it feels like writing a historical fiction gives them an excuse to be kind of explicit in ways they wouldn't be able to if they wrote any other time period.
Yes, there were marriages between very young people at the time. But did we need to have this sickly way of describing it? Did we need to invent that the Dauphin's mistress would actually be present in the bedroom to instruct the couple on which position to use? (Honestly, the idea of inventing this out of thin air felt like provocative bs)
Also the trope of "she is forced her first time but then SHE LIKES IT"?
This book angers me to no end. It had been on my TBR for 6 months and when I finally read it I wished I had tried it way before so i could have thrown it away, or better yet, I wish I had Catherine's powers of visions so I could have stopped myself from buying this book and waste 2 days of my life on this.
Seriously, there is a reason why people with actual experience as historians are the ones writing good books. Even authors I don't like as much due to their disrespect of historical accuracy did a better job at making their stories at least enjoyable to read (Exhibit A: the other boleyn sister is riddled with inaccuracies and wild claims, yet I legit enjoyed it, the characters felt real, the sex scenes did not feel obscene, the story was fun).
There isn't a world where I would ever try this author ever again. I wish I could say that this isn't an issue I see with a lot of male authors writing female protagonists, but I'd be lying. I sent a few paragraphs to a friend of mine and her first words were "let me guess, the author is a man".
The thing is, once I was no longer subjected to this bs in the first half, I was left with a book that was simply too bland. If even the historical aspect of the story cannot hold it together, then it is a sign that the writing and creative choices were a huge miss.
Please, spare yourselves the suffering and instead turn to proper historical fiction authors such as Alison Weir or Margaret George. I am begging you.
This book was bland, historically inaccurate, weirdly obsessed with the color of its teenage protagonists nipples, horribly paced, chaotic to follow and overall less enjoyable than any historical fiction that I have ever read. Even the books I DNF were more enjoyable and better written than this.
I powered through it in two days just because this book felt like a curse I could only break if I finished it then threw it away.
I really didn't like this book for several reasons:
1) It just wasn't gripping, good, or anything at all. I could barely understand what was going on most of the time, and it felt like 99% of the time it was only a copy paste of wikipedia done by a highschool student who'd skip paragraphs and take out names to make it look shorter.
2) Historical accuracy: I have almost no words. The author took MANY liberties, but worst of all, changed names and deleted characters to "make it easier" to follow the story, which did not work at all, let me tell you.
3) Some of the inventions had no use. Catherine de Medici is suddenly hot for her father-in-law and then 10 pages later mourns him as "the father she never had"? Really?
4) This is a typical "woman and her sex life written by a man". Have I read smut? yes. Do I dislike books for having graphic sex scenes? Nop. But this book was incredibly off in the way it approaches the sexual life of its teenage protagonist.
5) Confusing timeline. By page 80 she's been in France for 7 years but the description barely accounts for it. Pregnancies are skipped over, she is pregnant with her third one page and then 3 pages later she's about to give birth to the fourth, without concrete indication of the time passing.
6) The editing mistakes were the cherry on top. You write a historically inaccurate fiction, fine, you make it as boring as possible with no real appeal to the writing, fine. But you can't bother checking for typos?
7) The point of making Catherine a seer, putting it in the book description like a huge plot point, starting the book with it...and then we have maybe 4-5 prophecies where she basically "knows" a character is dead and then goes to check or is told of the death a few seconds later? There wasn't even a point in terms of it showing you other POVs so that you wouldn't be limited by the main character's limited mobility. It felt like such a weird detail that would pop off here and there.
8) The author couldn't bother finding a probable cause for Catherine's motives, so he decided that she was having a torrid love affair with one of the heretics, because, reasons?
9) I don't know if the author knows how to describe feelings, but the character felt like a piece of cardboard.
But my biggest issue with the book comes from the first half.
Why the author decided to be hyper descriptive of the body and sexual acts of the protagonist when she is 15 but not when she has a lover in her 40s is beyond me. The words spread eagle, silky breasts or dress stuck between my buttox feel less like a sensual description than some pleasure jn describing a woman’s humiliation and lack of control over what is done to her body.
I find it hard to believe describing the colour of the 15 yo protagonists nipple to be either historically needed or part of the character development description or novel ambiance
I am tired of men writing women in historical fiction by such lurid details, it feels like writing a historical fiction gives them an excuse to be kind of explicit in ways they wouldn't be able to if they wrote any other time period.
Yes, there were marriages between very young people at the time. But did we need to have this sickly way of describing it? Did we need to invent that the Dauphin's mistress would actually be present in the bedroom to instruct the couple on which position to use? (Honestly, the idea of inventing this out of thin air felt like provocative bs)
Also the trope of "she is forced her first time but then SHE LIKES IT"?
This book angers me to no end. It had been on my TBR for 6 months and when I finally read it I wished I had tried it way before so i could have thrown it away, or better yet, I wish I had Catherine's powers of visions so I could have stopped myself from buying this book and waste 2 days of my life on this.
Seriously, there is a reason why people with actual experience as historians are the ones writing good books. Even authors I don't like as much due to their disrespect of historical accuracy did a better job at making their stories at least enjoyable to read (Exhibit A: the other boleyn sister is riddled with inaccuracies and wild claims, yet I legit enjoyed it, the characters felt real, the sex scenes did not feel obscene, the story was fun).
There isn't a world where I would ever try this author ever again. I wish I could say that this isn't an issue I see with a lot of male authors writing female protagonists, but I'd be lying. I sent a few paragraphs to a friend of mine and her first words were "let me guess, the author is a man".
The thing is, once I was no longer subjected to this bs in the first half, I was left with a book that was simply too bland. If even the historical aspect of the story cannot hold it together, then it is a sign that the writing and creative choices were a huge miss.
Please, spare yourselves the suffering and instead turn to proper historical fiction authors such as Alison Weir or Margaret George. I am begging you.