Philippa Gregory is an odd one. Her Tudor Court novels
are largely quite exciting and salacious and keep you reading, and yet if you
try re-reading them her overlong sentences seem to hide some quite limited
vocabulary at times. I didn’t really get into ‘The Cousins’ War’ series, after
reading both The Red Queen and The White Queen, maybe because I didn’t
know anything about that historical period and so lost interest.
My main problem with her is that I tend to believe her
implicitly and so have a quite twisted view of British history.
This book was largely an okay choice, even if it was made
by my mum on a whim to bulk out an order she was making. It’s Philippa Gregory;
it’s young adult fiction; it’s about the Catholic church. It should be a
win-win all round for me. It was enjoyable enough in places and I particularly
liked the character of Freize.
Yet this book just seemed to expose Gregory’s apparently
quite limited vocabulary: characters were constantly ‘demanding’ something. The
plot sort of ambled around without much direction to it. There is an absolutely
ridiculous scene involving nuns attacking people, and the word ‘wimple’ (always
entertaining anyway) appeared so many times it was untrue; I couldn’t take
killer nuns seriously when their wimples kept falling off.
Basically, I agree with everything this young reviewer
said in The Guardian. I’ll probably keep reading the series if I can get hold
of them, if only to find out who the ‘real-life historical figure’ they’ll meet
is. I’ll admit it was interesting to find out so much about Islam at this time
and how Islamic nations were at the forefront of educating women. However, I
doubt I’ll be parting with cash in order to read them; I’ll pay more when
Gregory buys a thesaurus.
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