Reviews and Comments

The book is the story of Catherine of Aragon, starting from her youth and running until roughly her death. It achieves this vast timespan in a relatively small number of pages by consisting mostly of Catherine's voice describing the plot/history and snatches of dialogue, with very few actual scenes as such. So this is obviously bad as it's an uninteresting way to tell a story.

Where accuracy comes in is that one major way Erickson veers from it kills a lot of tension - Henry is a jerk from the moment he and Catherine actually get married. He resents her for taking any attention away from him and he blames her for the deaths of their infants; he's also a big coward and hardly does any work as king. This was all probably done to foreshadow what would later happen, but instead it goes so far as to suck out any suspense. If the only time there was any real love between them was the years between Arthur's death and their marriage, then it's completely unsurprising when he cheats. If he and Wolsey are talking about annulments and stuff after their first son dies, it's completely unsurprising when it actually happens ten years later. Telling a story where every reader knows the ending means that you have to play up how the characters don't know what's going to happen even more. Honestly, there's an entire novel to be made out of the pre-marriage section, by a good writer (although I think P-Gregs has done it as well), ending with the start of what appears to be a happy and loving marriage between C & H.

The other major inaccuracy was likewise done boringly. Erickson gave Catherine an illegitimate half-sister, Maria Juana. Her mother, Aldonza de Ivorra, was real, but the child they had together was a) male and b) born before Fernando married Isabela, where Maria Juana is about Catherine's age. Judging by the Wiki page, Fernando also managed his illegitimate daughters' marriages at home, too, where in the book he sends her to England with Catherine and demands that his daughter arrange a good marriage for her there. This actually could be a pretty cool thing to revolve a story around, but it's handled as boringly as possible. Aldonza is the stereotypical bitchy, entitled mistress à la common depictions of Barbara Castlemaine or Du Barry, and Maria Juana inherits the personality - and we're never really shown why either of them acts this way. This whole thing isn't a strong pillar of the book, Maria Juana goes off and does her own thing and pops up from time to time to be mean. About the time where I left off, she was the mistress of Charles V, who thought he could marry her, and she was telling Cath that if Cath helped that along MJ would testify that Arthur didn't have sex with her. Yes, the Holy Roman Emperor would totally do this. Maybe there was character development after that point, but I doubt it.

Overall, Catherine doesn't do anything and when she does do things, the action is dryly described from a distance.

The book's divided into five sections, each telling the life story of one of the canonical victims of Jack the Ripper. They're clearly the result of intense archival research, and Rubenhold pieced together census information, workhouse records, newspaper articles, inquests, and the like to uncover so many details. The idea that all five women were sex workers came from the prejudices of the middle-class Victorian world: in reality, most of them were involved with men they weren't married to in long-term monogamous relationships (a necessity for lower-working-class women, who rarely earned enough to support themselves) and were out at night because they were sleeping rough as they lacked the money for a bed in a doss house. Most of the sections show the way that one or two stumbles could force a family into the cycle of poverty, and the toll that alcoholism could take on a marriage or a life.

There are times when it feels like Rubenhold is stretching a tad in order to say what emotion a person would have been feeling, but overall it's both engaging and intellectually rigorous. The research is like what I did for an exhibition several years ago, but turned up to 11 (which is something, in fairness to me, you can only do for record-keeping institutions in urban environments and with the ability to travel around), so I really appreciate the incredible amount of time and effort put in.

The common thread with this, Lady W, and Covent Garden Ladies is Rubenhold's interest in women outside the norm/ideal of their time, in terms of sexual behavior. She always treats them sympathetically and as people with agency, yet at the same time without the insistence I sometimes see that this existence was necessarily freeing. It might be nice not to feel like you had to conform, but at the same time it was not nice to have "respectable" family members shun you, landlords force you out of your lodgings, and public officials treat you with scorn and disgust, not to mention to deal with any self-inflicted pain due to internalized misogyny/prejudice against sexually-active women.

Very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it's well-written, has interesting worldbuilding and character concepts, and focuses on political/social drama rather than a quest or love triangle. On the other hand, it feels very retrograde in some ways - more like a vestige of mid-20th-century lit than a work of '90s fantasy (or maybe my view of '90s fantasy is too rosy). Spoilers will follow.

(Going in, I knew this was a sequel but had been told it works as a stand-alone. I think for the most part it does, although some of the worldbuilding about which countries are which and what's this fiery well? was a little hard to grasp at first. Still confused about some of it, but that's on me for reading Book II first.)

Basic plot summary: Prospero is, of course, a sorcerer in exile with his daughter, the slightly feral Freia. Dewar is a cocky young sorcerer who teams up with young couple Otto and Luneté, a baron and countess-in-her-own-right, respectively. Otto starts a war of independence with the Empire, which then morphs into a war of Prospero vs. Empire, as the Emperor is his brother and usurped his position. Otto captures Freia, then passes her over to the Emperor to use as leverage against P. Dewar frees her and helps her, and the two become close. Prospero is taken down, but makes sure Freia inherits all of his land and titles.

So, I was interested enough to read this whole book, but I never got to the point where I was devouring it - I never got invested - because of three interrelated problems. 1) Lack of compelling emotion in the narrative and characters; 2) the treatment of female characters; 3) plot events seeming to just happen because they happened. I'd write about each one separately, but they all tend to come into play in everything that frustrated me.

For instance, Dewar. I intellectually find him interesting - he's youngish, very talented, bisexual, a fun guy - but never connect with him. This is all very surface stuff. We get hints of a tragic past - one scene reveals that his mother is a cruel sorceress who wants to punish him for running off, and he's still afraid of her - but it comes to nothing: it never appears to inform his actions. He's Otto's friend, but when the opportunity comes up he sleeps with Luneté (who is completely into it), and there's no evidence that this is a gleeful violation of morality, or a change in his feelings toward Otto, or overwhelming attraction, and it has no effect on the rest of the story. It feels like Willey remembered that heroes are supposed to bed hot ladies, so she made it so. Later on, he causes Freia to get captured and chooses not to tell Prospero about it, which leads to her being beaten, interrogated, and raped, and he feels bad about it for roughly five minutes before being annoyed that she's not opening up to him. (Good on him for taking her to Earth to get an abortion, though.) All of his selfish and amoral behavior seems ambiguously approved of, without the emotional satisfaction of a redemption arc or an understanding of why he thinks it's okay to be like this.

Freia herself really has no arc, being an object for most of the plot. (And she's the most present female character! Luneté disappears after Dewar sleeps with her, Miranda - who is, confusingly, not P's daughter - is killed in custody, Neyphile and Oriana pop in for cameos as sorceresses.) She goes to live on her own in the forest for seven years because she rejects her father's plans, she happens upon Dewar when he's wounded and tends to him in a farmhouse (he wants to sleep with her and the reader knows they're half-siblings, which is never really walked back), she tries to take him to Prospero and gets left behind, going from captivity under Otto to a sadistic mercenary to her imperial uncles' palace, then rescued and cared for by Dewar. By the end, she has been completely let down by her father not saving her, and while Dewar kinds of tries to reach her emotionally, he doesn't try very hard. Her shift from loner to leader, through her inheritance, could be an arc, but she's not given enough screen time/action to actually become a leader in and of herself. It actually might have been a five-star book if it had been centered on a journey from Weird Girl In The Woods to a lady commander, but that just didn't happen.

And the other characters, bar Otto - who remains interestingly human - all get this to some extent. Why do they do things? What do they care about? I don't know. These days, I expect a fantasy novel to have much more introspection and naked emotion rather than (I guess) picaresque adventure.

There are comparisons to Chronicles of Amber because of the warring princes, and that's fair, but to me it's the lack of emotional connection and action for action's sake that makes the parallel apt.

A historical novel written in a modern literary style. I went back and forth over whether or not I liked the modern style - generally, I prefer historical fiction to be written in a good pastiche of the style of the period where it's set, but if you want to do something different narratively, it's much better to use a modern one instead. As the publisher's blurb states, this is in the vein of eighteenth-century fiction in that the hero is kind of a scoundrel, but he's much less straightforwardly scoundrelish than Tom Jones, who was always looking out for a good time. Richard has a Plan.

And at the same time, you really get a sense of what New York City would have been like in the colonial period. So often, "colonial" really means "revolutionary" and we have to run through the complaints about taxation and quartering, but this is the King's New York! It's just a city on the fringe of the empire, and one that was taken from someone else's empire at that. Coin money from various countries is difficult to scrape together, so when Richard Smith disembarks with a note for £1000, it causes a huge stir and puts a target on his back.

Richard is an interesting character who is largely a mystery to the reader even as a first-person narrator for much of the book, until his background is laid bare. (I have to note that I didn't really connect emotionally with the story until that point.) His match is met in Tabitha Lovell, the daughter of the merchant attempting to fulfill Richard's note and a deeply unhappy, acerbic young woman. Their love story does not end at all as you'd suspect, and the book's ending is both satisfying and unsatisfying.

The Flirt feels a lot like Alice Adams, which means that if you liked the latter you'll be interested in the former, but at the same time, you might feel like you've taken this ride before. (The Flirt was, however, written almost a decade before Alice Adams.) Like the Adamses, the Madisons are on the outskirts of society, mixing with upper-middle-class families while they can barely afford upkeep on their run-down house; like Alice, Cora Madison is charming and given the best of everything by her parents while her brother sneers at her affectation of poshery.

The major difference between these two stories is that The Flirt is much more of a morality tale. Cora strings along a fiancée throughout the book, Richard Lindley, a good man who is unaccountably blind to her flimsiness, while flirting with other men she finds more interesting - and in contrast to Alice's steps toward reality and self-sufficiency at the end of her story, Cora instead responds to the loss of her interesting suitor (a con man) by quickly marrying a third party and getting out of town before the storm hits. Cora also has a second sibling that Alice lacks, a much more ethical and morally pure sister, Laura, who is silently and madly in love with Richard. In a denouement not unlike Mansfield Park's, Richard comes to realize that Laura is actually far superior to Cora in personality, and is very lovely when not standing next to her vivacious and angelic-looking sister. This isn't as effective emotionally as, for instance, Richard realizing this during one of the many instances where Laura is bashfully sitting with him while Cora flirts with someone else as though he's not there, but, as with Mansfield Park, it is a far more realistic ending.

Three stars, because Richard and Laura were a little too good, and I just wanted a bit more bang for this story.

If this were fanfiction, I would call it pure idfic. The writing is really top-notch, but what sells the story (to me, anyway) is the hurt/comfort vibe and the exaggeration of how the protagonist is treated, and his and his love interest's character development. In addition, it's a great window into small-city American life around the turn of the century, sort of like The Music Man, but a bit darker and grittier.

As a teenager, Joe Louden was known as a bad one - largely because his stepmother insisted on his father spending all the money on her own son, leaving Joe to support himself shamefully by selling newspapers. Joe hung out with a rough crowd: the transient working class, gasp African-Americans, and the family's very poor tomboy neighbor, Ariel. After leaving in disgrace, Joe returns years later as a credentialed lawyer; he expects that his reputation will have been forgotten, but finds that it's been embroidered ever since he left, and as a result nobody respectable will speak to him, let alone hire him. He takes up defending his rough companions instead, which only makes him less popular. In the meantime, Ariel and her grandfather inherited a large sum of money and went off to Paris, where she became refined, fashionable, and a drop-dead knockout. When she gets back, she, of course, will speak to Joe, and her actions throw the whole town into turmoil. Joe defends an innocent man accused of murder, and in the end the town comes to recognize his worth.

This basic summary doesn't really let on how much the text lingers indulgently on Joe's faithfulness to those who've been kind to him, how dreadfully the upper strata of Canaan treat him, and so on. To some extent, this is a grown-up and masculine version of A Little Princess. So if you're into that kind of story, then full steam ahead!

Warning: There is a certain amount of African-American eye dialect, which is extremely cringey.