I won The Last Tudor by Philippa Gregory in a Goodreads giveaway last month, so I've been trying to plow through it so that I can get back to books that don't suck.
TUDOR ERA SPOILERS BELOW!
I enjoyed some of Philippa Gregory's other work; I liked The Other Boleyn Girl because, while I knew the story of Anne Boleyn, I knew jack about her sister. I liked The Queen's Fool, because it was about a servant who had her own crazy shit going on and whose life was not spent waiting around. I LOVED the Tradescant series, because it was not a period I knew very well, or a story I knew at all, plus things got a little gay.
But I feel like the last few books of hers that I've read suffer from one, or both, of the following problems.
1) While we may not know the intricacies of some of these stories, we probably already know the outcome. And if the outcome is failure, then I don't really need to read about it. So, like, in The Other Queen, I already know that Mary, Queen of Scots, doesn't escape. So...I don't need to read that. But, of course, I did, because I thought maybe there was something else interesting about the story that I didn't know! There wasn't.
2) I think it's super awesome to write these stories from the perspective of the women. But women barely got to do anything back then unless they were a lowly servant, or the Queen, so if the book is not about a lowly servant or the Queen, the whole book is just the main characters waiting for things to happen. And talking about waiting for things to happen. Which is just boring as fuck. The Red Queen suffered from this problem.
I had high hopes for The Last Tudor, because I don't know a ton about Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days Queen. And I still don't, because she is married, crowned, and killed within a few chapters. So the rest of the book is about her two sisters, Katherine and Mary, who, due to family ties, should have been Elizabeth I's heirs.
"Cool," I thought, "I have never heard of them! What happens to them?"
Well, it turns out that they both marry without Elizabeth's permission and are punished for it by being imprisoned for fucking years and never seeing their husbands again and then dying.
The whole book is spent with the two of them waiting for Elizabeth to release them. That's it.
You're welcome.
In related news, I have noticed a theme running through all of Philippa Gregory's books, and that theme is "I hate Elizabeth I." Philippa Gregory hates Elizabeth. She HATES her. She hates her like a certain intractable segment of the American population hates Hillary Clinton. It's weird and kind of distracting. Like, ANY Philippa Gregory book in which Elizabeth is mentioned talks about what a vain whore she is, even when she's, like 3. Philippa, we get it. You don't like Liz. MOVE ON.
The annual Goodreads reading challenge is getting down to the wire, you guys. Last year I missed my goal of 40 books by a mere three books but this year, I'm three books ahead of schedule, so yeah - I'm kind of a big deal.
Are we friends on Goodreads? If not, we should be. I love creeping on what other people are reading!