World of Royalty Blog

Most of this month’s new books about royalty have run-of-the-mill covers, but there are a few standouts.  The cover of Notorious Royal Marriages by Leslie Carroll is colorful and lively. And — although I am tired of book covers featuring headless women — the cover of Kate Emerson’s novel Between Two Queens is eye-catchingly pretty.

So I’m probably wrong to pick THIS as the best royalty book cover of January 2010, but I can’t help it. It’s just so wonderfully silly:

 

In case you haven’t guessed, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter by A. E. Moorat is a work of fiction. An excerpt from the publisher’s description:

London, 1838. Queen Victoria is crowned; she receives the orb, the scepter, and an arsenal of bloodstained weaponry… But rather than dreams of demon hunting, Queen Victoria’s thoughts are occupied by Prince Albert. Can she dedicate her life to saving her country when her heart belongs elsewhere? With lashings of glistening entrails, decapitations, zombies, and foul demons, this masterly new portrait will give a fresh understanding of a remarkable woman, a legendary monarch, and quite possibly the best demon hunter the world has ever seen.

Oh, Queen Victoria. To think I ever found you boring.

What do you think of this book’s cover — and its concept?

Susan Higginbotham of the Medieval Woman blog doesn’t like Philippa Gregory’s new novel about Elizabeth Woodville, The White Queen, but the Empress of Good & Evil from the Royal Reviews blog gives it a good review.

UPDATE: Elizabeth Kerri Mahon from the Scandalous Women blog likes it, too.

Ken Follett’s novel The Pillars of the Earth is being made into an eight-hour television miniseries. I’ve read the book; it has a lot of action and drama and should make a great TV series. More info:

Filming of The Pillars of the Earth (from Ken Follett’s site)

The Pillars of the Earth television event series (official site)

My brief review of the book.

The King’s Rose by Alisa M. Libby is a novel about English king Henry VIII’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard. Her exact date of birth is unknown, but she was a teenager — only fifteen, according to this book — when she married the aging king.

The book starts shortly before Catherine’s marriage to the king. The details of his past, and Catherine’s, are revealed gradually, making the story suspenseful even if you already know all about Henry and his wives.

Libby does an excellent job of portraying the gulf between the powerful, proud king and his young bride. Catherine is awed by Henry and never really gets to know him because he won’t let her.

To his court, King Henry is a powerful monarch, stalwart and sturdy, draped in magnificent jewels. Now I’ve glimpsed the old man hiding behind the robes of state, and I know more than is safe to know about a king, let alone to  put into words.

The king thinks Catherine is pure and innocent, but she has a sexual past that soon comes back to haunt her. She is also haunted by the memory of her cousin Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who was executed on charges of adultery, but that doesn’t stop Catherine from cheating on the king, sealing her own tragic fate. The author makes you feel sorry for the self-deluded, romantic girl who doesn’t understand how recklessly she is behaving until it is too late.

This is being marketed as a young adult (teen) book, but I don’t see anything that separates it from an adult book. There’s nothing very explicit in it, but it is frank. If you don’t want your daughter reading about premarital sex, impotence, adultery, and execution (not to mention Anne Boleyn’s scary ghost), don’t give her this book. Maybe read it yourself instead.

It’s well-written and fast-paced, with lots of great lines and insights. I enjoyed it, and after reading it I’ll always look at Catherine Howard more sympathetically.

Sarah Johnson of Reading the Past asks, “Do historical novels require celebrities to play more than passing roles, so that readers get the opportunity to ‘meet’ them?”

My answer is no. I like biographical novels, but I also like historical novels about fictional people. I can always pick up a nonfiction book to learn more about a specific historical person or event.

However, historical nonfiction is often very dry and academic. (One of the most boring books I’ve ever read was a biography of Mozart; don’t ask me how the author managed to make him so dull.) Maybe that’s why some readers turn to fiction to learn about history. Maybe there’s a need for more entertaining — not dumbed down — historical nonfiction. Just a thought.

If so, check out the Royal Intrigue blog, which is devoted to the prolific historical novelist (who also wrote under other pen names, including Victoria Holt).

Two of my favorite blogs — Sarah Johnson’s Reading the Past and Julianne Douglas’s Writing the Renaissance — were recently awarded the Excellent Blog Award by other bloggers, and in turn passed the award on to me. Congratulations and thank you to both ladies!

I recently participated in this blog meme by naming 10 blogs for the award, so it’s probably too soon for me to do that again. But you really should check out Sarah and Julianne’s blogs. They both focus on historical fiction, and they’re both truly excellent.

From the Writer of Queens blog, here’s an interview with Sandra Gulland, author of the new novel Mistress of the Sun, which is about Louise de la Vallière, mistress of France’s King Louis XIV.

Here’s a quick look at two historical novels I’ve read recently.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett: It took me approximately forever to read this very long novel about the building of a cathedral in 12th century England. It has two well-motivated central characters: Philip, a humble prior who struggles against all obstacles to build the cathedral, and an evil earl’s son, William Hamleigh, who goes to great lengths to try to thwart Philip’s plans.

The historical setting in this book is well-drawn, especially the important role played by religion in the lives of most of the characters. Philip is devout, as you might expect, but the villainous William Hamleigh also shares the religious beliefs of the time, and his fear of priests and eternal damnation helps to drive the plot.

Ken Follett is famous for his suspense novels. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the battle scenes in this book even though military details usually bore me. Overall, Pillars of the Earth is an entertaining historical novel, and I intend to read the sequel, World Without End.

Here’s Ken Follett’s official website.

Shogun by James Clavell: If you’re old enough, you might remember the 1980 TV mini-series based on this book, starring Richard Chamberlain. The story takes place in the 1600s, when an English ship’s pilot, Blackthorne, is shipwrecked in Japan and is forced to quickly adapt to a culture very different from his own. Meanwhile, he becomes a pawn in a political game played by Japanese feudal leaders on the brink of civil war.

The story held my interest. The historical details were interesting, and so was the cultural clash between the English and Japanese characters — and later, between Blackthorne and his own shipmates, who start to seem barbaric to Blackthorne as he becomes assimilated into Japanese ways.

Late in the book, the writer stops focusing on Blackthorne and switches his attention to the powerful and wily lord Toranaga, whose apparent goal (although he denies it) is to become ruler of Japan.

However, the story ends before Toranaga’s military campaign starts. The fate of many of the characters, including Toranaga, is left open. I found this disappointing, and in particular I would have preferred a better resolution to Blackthorne’s storyline.

Still, it’s a good book and I recommend it to patient readers. (I say “patient” because the book is more than one thousand pages long.) James Clavell died in 1994, so he doesn’t have an official website as far as I know, but here’s his Wikipedia entry.

Today I planned to post mini-reviews of three historical novels I’ve read recently. But as it turned out, I had so much to say about one of those books that it deserves its own post!

That book is Mistress of the Revolution by Catherine Delors. The main character, Gabrielle, is an aristocratic young French woman who falls into poverty and survives by becoming the mistress of a nobleman. Later, during the French Revolution, she is the mistress of a Revolutionary Tribunal judge. The story is told as a memoir written by Gabrielle when she is middle-aged.

Catherine Delors has a clean and graceful writing style that is a pleasure to read. She comes up with plausible ways to bring Gabrielle into contact with real historical figures and events, and provides a glimpse at the prejudices of the nobility and how the revolution crept up on them. The characters are complex and seem to have genuine 18th-century attitudes. Most of them seem like real people, not stereotypes.

I liked the way Delors presents the relationships between men and women. As the mistress of a wealthy and controlling man, Gabrielle leads a comfortable but dependent life, and the writer doesn’t sugar-coat the drawbacks of being a kept woman. Gabrielle’s relationship with her older brother is also complicated and interesting.

As a narrator, Gabrielle is sometimes surprisingly matter-of-fact. At times I wanted to be told more about her thoughts and feelings, especially her reaction to the revolution. We know that she supports its ideals, but she doesn’t say much about that or share how she feels about the violent collapse of the world she’s always known. However, Gabrielle’s calm approach works very well in the book’s most horrific scenes, where the plain details speak for themselves.

I felt I learned a lot about the French Revolution from this book, but the history didn’t overwhelm the story. Gabrielle is a likeable and believable narrator. I was sorry when the book ended, because I wanted to find out how Gabrielle’s son reacted to reading her memoir! That should give you an idea how engrossing this book is. I recommend it.

Here’s Catherine Delors’ official site. Her next novel, tentatively titled “For the King,” is due to be published next year. I’m looking forward to it.