Take a photo of a barcode or cover
lauriereadsrom1 's review for:
Rival to the Queen
by Carolly Erickson
I'm generously giving this book 2 stars because if nothing else, it was an easy weekend read and it was interesting to gain perspective on Lettice Knollys' side of her love affair with Robert Dudley. She's usually depicted as the "bad guy" because she "steals" Dudley from poor Queen Elizabeth. I didn't really know anything about Lettice other than the fact that she and Dudley were secretly married without the queen's permission, so it was interesting to learn of her earlier life and what happened to her after Dudley's death. That being said, this book was definitely not as good as Erickson's previous books, partially because there just wasn't a whole lot of action but also because there were a lot of stupid mistakes that I wouldn't have expected from such a renowned historian. Some of them were so glaringly obvious that her editor should have caught them even if he or she had no knowledge of British history at all. For example, very early in the book Erickson goes through a convoluted explanation of how Lettice's mother, Catherine Carey, was Elizabeth I's aunt because their mothers were sisters. It is true that Catherine Carey's mother, Mary Boleyn, was Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn's older sister, but that would make Catherine and Elizabeth first cousins, not aunt and niece. As part of her explanation of the family relationship, Erickson also brought up the rumors that Mary Boleyn's two oldest children, Catherine and her brother Henry Carey, were Henry VIII's bastards. If those rumors were true - something that to my knowledge has never been proven - Catherine and Elizabeth would actually be half sisters as well as first cousins. This is something that anyone with common sense should have been able to catch and correct long before the book went into print.
As other reviewers have noted, there were a number of things that seemed implausible to me, such as Elizabeth keeping a diary in the margins of some random book and carelessly leaving it lying around where anyone could see it. Also, I know that there were attempts on Elizabeth's life, but were there really as many as Erickson seems to indicate?
This is definitely something that is only worth reading if you can borrow it from the library. Even though I only paid $6 for a bargain copy of the hardcover edition, I feel like that was too much.
As other reviewers have noted, there were a number of things that seemed implausible to me, such as Elizabeth keeping a diary in the margins of some random book and carelessly leaving it lying around where anyone could see it. Also, I know that there were attempts on Elizabeth's life, but were there really as many as Erickson seems to indicate?
This is definitely something that is only worth reading if you can borrow it from the library. Even though I only paid $6 for a bargain copy of the hardcover edition, I feel like that was too much.