The Last Daughter is an unusual, intriguing novel featuring time travel, magical artifacts and an interesting defense of Anne Lovell. It’s well-written, well-researched, engrossing and incredibly original – but the magical world-building is somewhat weak. The plot is split between two different storylines which eventually intertwine in the last half of the novel. The first…
Normally, I find a wide range of quality in an anthology. Tudor Christmas Tidings, however, is consistent from start to finish. That’s great for the strengths – every novella in this anthology has a wonderful sense of setting, with well-integrated historical figures. However, the main weakness of inadequately-developed romances is present in every story as…
Philippa Gregory – author of the White Queen and White Princess novels, and of The Other Boleyn Girl – needs no introduction from me. This somewhat disastrous fifteenth tome in her series chronicling the lives of the Plantagenet and Tudor dynasties sweeps us from the reign of Edward I to the execution of Mary, Queen…
The Virgin’s War is the final book in Laura Andersen’s Tudor Legacy series and the sixth book to take place in the alternate Tudor timeline that she set up back in The Boleyn King, book one of her compelling Boleyn Trilogy. In that series, Anne Boleyn had given Henry VIII a son who lived to…
As a long-time reader of historical fiction, I didn’t think a book which explored an “alternative” historical time-line would be my cup of tea. So I approached the first book in Laura Andersen’s Boleyn Trilogy a little apprehensively, but determined to keep an open mind. I was very quickly sucked into the story, became invested…
What do you get when you mix the magic and mystery of the Fey version of Camelot with Queen Mary of England and the Spanish Inquisition? Well, I had hoped a great story, but I felt that the contradictions of the enchantment of Camelot and the word at the cusp of Enlightenment became just too…
Captured by Desire is a Tudor romance set in Scotland, with characters who are both commoners: The heroine is a goldsmith’s apprentice, and the hero is a huntsman for a nobleman. This scenario was certainly novel enough to catch my eye. But while the idea is fresh, the prose really isn’t. The love scenes and…
I had hopes. Oh, how I had hopes. But alas, my Lady Defiant was a little too (urk) defiant for me. Oriel Robinson is twenty years of age and living with her detested relatives in the northern boondocks of Elizabethan England. As a great heiress, she receives many suitors in their corner of the island,…
When I read the blurb on the back of the Queen’s Handmaiden I thought, “Ugh, it takes place over a decade.” I generally dislike sagas. When I started reading the novel, I thought, “Ugh, it’s in the first person”. I generally find it harder to get into the story when it is in the first…
The story of Henry VIII and his wives is a well-known one and, in most portrayals, Catherine of Aragon is shown as a victim, sometimes even a martyr of Henry’s desire for a male heir. The repeated descriptions of her as barren or as a pitiable, cast-aside wife make it hard for many readers to…