It’s the kind of book that allows you to savor it, because it’s not plot driven. I read it in the mornings, for 30 or 40 minutes at a time, and not every day. The driving force of the novel is Thomas Cromwell, who I knew mainly from C. J. Sansom’s historical mysteries; The Tudors;  and various, scattered pieces I’d read about the Dissolution. Most often, he’s portrayed as a villain. Brilliant, sly, but a villain nonetheless.

Nothing is what one expects in Wolf Hall. It’s all complexities and contradictions. Cardinal Wolsey is a giant of a man; Sir Thomas More, a brilliant hypocrite. Henry VIII, selfish, obsessed with his former queen, Katherine, and the fact that people still love her. And Cromwell himself, a driven workaholic genius, but closer to hearth and home than we’d ever imagine. A loving husband and father, and a person who takes in orphans, children of friends, women in trouble, and earns the love, respect, and devotion of them all.

The book opens with a stunning scene depicting the brutality of Thomas Cromwell’s father kicking him down the street, nearly killing him. The years that came after, before his return to England and a place with Cardinal Wolsey, we learn about in bits and pieces throughout the book. Mantel shows us his fierce loyalty to Wolsey, and his gradual, deliberate transformation into King Henry’s chief adviser.

There are gorgeous descriptive passages, funny asides, moments of emotional clarity, and countless times we see the man behind the persona. The man who, though he hides it well, has never quite gotten over being thought of as a murderer, the son of a smithy, a mercenary, a person of low birth. He is, in fact, all of the above.

The juxtaposition of Cromwell with More was a stroke of genius. A dinner with the More family, Sir Thomas presiding, is revealing. More is exposed as cruel to his wife, pitiless to his daughter-in-law, and horribly condescending to everyone else. It’s a painful scene for the reader to witness. In the end, we can’t shed a tear for More’s demise. But Cromwell, despite his lifelong animosity for the man, still feels sorrow for him. “He can hardly bear it, to think of More sitting in the dark.”

I’ll close with a particularly beautiful passage, near the end of the book: “Clouds drift and mass in towers and battlements, blowing in from Essex, stacking up over the city, driven by the wind across the broad soaked fields, across the sodden pastureland and swollen rivers, across the dripping forests of the west and out over the sea to Ireland.”

I admit, the title Wolf Hall has me stumped. It’s the country seat of the Seymours. Cromwell has a special friendship with Jane Seymour–not a romance–before she’s caught Henry’s eye. At the end of the book, Cromwell is planning Henry’s Progress for the year, and says they’ll end at Wolf Hall. The last line of the book: “Early September. Five days. Wolf Hall.”

What do you think? Why is the book called Wolf Hall?

A book to read again. And again.

A writer of historical fiction, her specialty is the Middle Ages. She has nineteen books to her credit. See what I mean about not discovering her before now? Especially since her first book was published in 1989 (The Wild Hunt), and is still in print.

After I read  The Champion (1998), I took a look at her web site. It’s beautifully designed, has a Medieval look to it, and is packed with information about her books and research. You can also find her reference library (an extensive list of her resources), her biography, a glossary, music she enjoys listening to while writing, and much more.

The Champion begins with the two brothers, Hervi and Alexander, around whom most of the story revolves. Hervi is the older, and a seasoned tourney knight. He believes his younger brother Alexander is leading the religious life at Cranwell Abbey, where he’d been sent as a young boy. Abused by one of the priests, however, Alexander escapes and sets out to find his brother. Exhausted and near starvation when he arrives at Hervi’s camp, Alexander begs to be taken in. When he regains his health, Alexander begins training to become a tourney knight.

Monday de Cerizay and her mother and father are friends of Hervi and also live in the camp. As she and Alexander grow older, Monday begins to have feelings for Alexander, but by this time he’s made a name for himself on the field and is sought after by many beautiful maidens. One night, when both he and Monday have had too much wine, she gives in to her feelings for him and they make love. Although Alexander offers her marriage, she realizes he doesn’t love her, and having lost both her mother and father, she sets off on her own.

There are some excellent villains in this book. Eudo le Boucher, a fearsome tourney knight who wants Alexander dead; King John, who takes Monday as his mistress, then casts her aside for his twelve-year-old bride; Monday’s own grandfather, who wants her only to broker a marriage with a wealthy family; and perhaps the worst of all: Brother Alkmund, the sub-prior of Cranwell Abbey. At one point, le Boucher and Monday’s grandfather join together to destroy Alexander, with the king’s tacit approval. Chadwick does an especially good job with King John (brother of Richard the Lionhearted). He’s selfish and heartless, uses people cruelly, and is by nature jealous. When the child he and Monday have together dies, he expresses no sorrow and has no words of comfort for her.

The historical detail in this book is meticulous, so visual and rich, I felt as if I were watching a movie. Chadwick’s description of the clothing–rendered in especially great detail because Monday is a sempstress–is outstanding. Everything to do with the tourney field, and actual battles as well, is real and immediate, including descriptions of the swords and swordplay, shields, chain mail, and horsemanship.

I can’t wait to read another of Chadwick’s books!

Then someone in my Jane Austen group suggested I read a Georgette Heyer novel. Supposedly, the next best thing to reading Jane. Not my words, nor the words of the person who recommended Heyer, but I actually did read that somewhere recently. So I read Bath Tangle, and I loved it, which forced me to read several more of her books. Georgette Heyer, for the uninitiated, is the queen of Regency romance. She practically invented the genre. Her books are full of witty repartee, undercurrents of sexual tension, and meticulous historical detail. Heyer wrote from the 1920’s up until her death in 1974.

Someone else suggested Mary Balogh. I started with A Summer To Remember, read all the Simply’s, plus a few others, and I loved them all. Typically, they have a certain sweetness about them. Then I discovered Julia Quinn. Besides five of the Bridgerton family novels, I read The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever and  Mr. Cavendish, I Presume. Quinn’s trademark seems to be humor, sometimes of the laugh-out-loud variety. Then I got going on Jo Beverly and her Rogues, and after that, Stephanie Laurens and the Bastion Club. Are you getting the picture?

Last winter, I was knitting a sweater that was way beyond my abilities, and therefore taking forever. To entertain myself, I began listening to audios of some of these books. Doing so saved me from insanity. Although in retrospect, perhaps concentrating too much on the stories caused me to make all those mistakes which eventually had to be ripped out. Unlike Georgette Heyer’s books, the modern regencies are very sexy!

For pure escapism, the Regencies can’t be beat. Oh, yes, there’s a formula to them, but that’s okay. It’s what romance readers expect, indeed, demand. At least I think it is. Because, as I mentioned before, I’m not really a romance reader.

Most of the book is set in England, in 1794. Sovay, betrayed by her first love, decides to re-invent herself as a highwayman. As it turns out, she robs a coach carrying the lover who spurned her. He then takes his revenge by reporting her father as a traitor.

Sovay goes to London to try to warn her father, who has been away from Compton, their country home, for some time. The housekeeper informs her that her father is no longer there. Meanwhile, Gabriel, son of the Compton steward, checks on Sovay’s brother Hugh at Oxford. He discovers that Hugh was “sent down” because he wrote a seditions pamphlet. He has fled to France.

While in London, Sovay meets the spymaster Robert Dysart. As it turns out, he’s the one orchestrating the campaign against Sovay’s father, and countless others. A high official in the British government, he obsesses about the English rebelling, as the French did. He has taken matters into his own hands and is the epitome of evil.

Sovay is surrounded by men: Gabriel Stanhope; Virgil Barrett, an American who has taken on the job of warning people about Dysart; Captain Greenwood, a highwayman Sovay meets in her escapades; her brother Hugh, who finally makes an appearance in London; Mr. Oldfield, family friend and solicitor who is also working against Dysart. Eventually, in the last third of the book, Sovay, Hugh, and Virgil end up fleeing to France because they’re wanted for treason in England. There, Sovay meets the dashing Captain Leon, a passionate believer in the French cause. The two fall in love.

The French Revolution has devolved into chaos, with Robespierre at the helm, executing citizens by the hundreds. Sovay’s father is in prison, dangerously ill and awaiting execution. Although Virgil and Leon both try to save her, Sovay herself ends up in prison with her father.

I don’t want to reveal the ending, but it seemed a bit too easy. My only other criticism of the book is that all the men–Gabriel, Virgil, Greenwood, and Leon–are in love with Sovay. Beautiful, clever, and daring, Sovay is undoubetedly appealing, but isn’t it a bit unrealistic that every man she meets immediately falls for her?

But these are minor flaws in an otherwise captivating and wonderfully written book. Sovay is a great read, with danger coming at a furious pace. The political intrigue seems real and always threatening. Thoroughly grounded in her research, Rees made this frightening time come alive for me.

Have you read it, or any of Rees’s other books? What did you think?

The first book in the series, Silent in the Grave, involves the death of Lady Julia’s husband. Turns out-big surprise-he was murdered. Brisbane, whom her husband had consulted prior to his death, reluctantly steps in to help solve the mystery. He and Lady Julia have an adversarial relationship as well as a strong attraction to each other. Turns out Lady Julia’s marriage was not a happy one, so falling for another man so soon after her husband’s death is easily forgiven. The mystery is intriguing, and the murderer turns out to be someone you’d least suspect.
The next book, Silent in the Sanctuary, though featuring many of the same characters, had a less plausible mystery, with too many threads to be untangled. The big shocker occurs early, when Lady Julia arrives at her family home after a prolonged stay in Italy and finds Brisbane there. Not only there, but engaged to another woman. That certainly made me want to read on.

Silent on the Moor was released just this year, in an original paperback. The mystery was more engaging, as were the characters. The major hitch in this book comes at the beginning, when despite Brisbane’s specific wish that they not come, Lady Julia and her sister and brother show up at his new estate on the Yorkshire moors. Julia justifies this by saying that when Brisbane most protests her presence in his life, that is when he most needs her. An undeniably romantic sentiment, but getting past that was a problem for me.

Sometimes I think adversarial romantic relationships go too far. The lovers seem so hostile to each other, one wonders how or why they could actually be in love. There should always be obstacles to overcome in a relationship, but the way in which Brisbane keeps Lady Julia at arm’s length is too much. I’d have given up on him many times over before the end.

But these were minor distractions in otherwise enjoyable reads. Have you read any books in this series? What did you think?

Some crucial ingredients for historical mysteries, at least in my mind, are characterization, period detail, and mood. And of course, a mystery that keeps you guessing until the end, with plenty of plot twists and reversals. A little romance thrown into the mix isn’t bad, either!

Two series I’ve been into lately are C.S.’s Harris’s Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries, set during the Regency, and Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia Gray mysteries, which are Victorian. They make an interesting contrast: the first with a male protagonist, the second, a woman.

Sebastian St. Cyr, the dashing Viscount Devlin, is our hero in Harris’s books. There are now four of them: What Angels Fear, When Gods Die, Where Serpents Sleep, and Why Mermaids Sing. Devlin is handsome, smart, brooding, fearless, and his life itself is a mystery of sorts. He was not in line to inherit his father’s title, but his two older brothers both died young. He feels he’s been a disappointment to his father, especially because of his liaison with Kat Boleyn, an actress. In the third book, he finds out the real reason his father is so opposed to their romance, and it’s devastating. But, of course, all may not be what it seems.

Lord Jarvis, Devlin’s archenemy, is the man running the government, for all intents and purposes, given that the ridiculous Prince Regent is now king. You can count on Jarvis pulling strings in the background, working against Devlin in some devious capacity. His daughter, Hero, introduced in the first book as a somewhat lackluster spinster, becomes more intriguing in each book, and in the fourth one, she and Viscount Devlin develop a more personal relationship.

Adding to the mix is Sebastian’s uncanny and almost supernatural ability to see in the dark and hear sounds most normal people would miss. We also have a mystery surrounding his mother. Initially, we believe her to be dead, but we now know she’s alive, living in France. At the end of the last book, it looked as if Devlin was on his way to mending his relationship with his father. One can only wonder, now, what will happen between Devlin and Kat; Devlin and Hero; and Devlin and his mother!

Harris has a new book coming out later this year, so we won’t have to wait too long for more of Viscount Devlin’s adventures. In a future post, I’ll talk about the Lady Julia Gray series.

Some of what was wrong with this book could have been fixed by line editing, or an editor’s eye. Certain phrases were repeated numerous times. For example, when Maisie shook hands with male detectives from Scotland Yard, she’d say, “He held onto my hand a few more seconds than was absolutely necessary.” That lets us know, I guess, that they’re attracted to Maisie and revealing their feelings in an inappropriate way which she does not appreciate. Part of the humorlessness, I guess.

I’ve enjoyed the earlier books in the series. In fact, I couldn’t wait until the second one made its appearance. But I was disappointed with the last one, too.

In Among the Mad, the theme is the shameful treatment of WWI vets and the way in which it sends one man over the edge. This has been a thread running through all the Maisie Dobbs books, and appropriately. Given the horrors of that war for Europeans, and the millions who died or came home maimed, it’s about time for an author who has a wide audience to bring a forgotten part of history to life–especially for Americans, who tend to think they were the saviors. Think about the song “Over There.” “The Yanks are coming, the yanks are coming, etc.” We didn’t show up until the very end.

But I thought Winspear was rather heavy handed in driving her point home, with too many interior monologues and/or written diary entries that basically made the same arguments again and again, until it no longer seemed sympathetic to me. The author’s portrayal of Maisie’s brain-damaged fiancee Simon, before his death, was more empathetic and humane, in my view.

As always, I enjoyed the human interest created by Billy, Maisie’s assistant, and the predicament of his unfortunate wife Doreen. The horrofic way in which people with emotional problems were treated was not reserved for returning vets alone. Maisie comes alive in her dealings with Billy and his family. She seems more loving, open, and well, more like the rest of us.

With her legions of fans, Winspear is sure to have another success with her latest. What did you think? Agree or disagree?

Hard Face Moon focuses on events leading up to the horrific Sand Creek Massacre. The reader sees the action unfold through the eyes of Hides Inside, a Cheyenne boy. After the trauma of losing both parents when he was barely old enough to walk, Hides Inside hasn’t spoken. Although he sometimes feels words rising in his throat and tries to force them out, nothing happens.

Because he doesn’t speak, Hides Inside is taunted unmercifully by the other boys, especially by Two Crows, his archenemy. Every so often, he loses control and fights back, inevitably disappointing his brother, Standing Tall, whom he loves and admires. More than anything, Hides Inside wants to be a proud Cheyenne warrior like Standing Tall. Meanwhile Standing Tall, older, wiser, and more experienced, believes the Cheyenne should try to make peace with the white men and is beginning to put aside the ways of a warrior.

Hides Inside’s growth pains are something all boys and girls can identify with. He wants to go on raids, fight, and count coup. He wants to be someone who is celebrated and honored when he returns to camp. Too young to make his own decisions, Hides Inside must wait until Standing Tall believes he’s ready. Until he learns patience and self-discipline, his older brother will not allow him to train to become a warrior.

Both Hides Inside and Two Crows disagree with the peace-seeking efforts of their chiefs. This is the one thing they have in common. As the story progresses and both boys mature, Hides Inside begins to grow in his understanding of Two Crows.

Oswald’s style is perfectly suited to this story. Her spare prose seems to meld with Cheyenne ways and culture, most of all with the heart and mind of Hides Inside. Hard Face Moon is rich with imagery, perfectly portraying the way Hides Inside experiences the world. Picture this: “We leave the valley between the two ridges and climb onto the flat. Now it is easy to see everyone stretched out in a long line like colored beads on an invisible rope.” Hear and feel this:  “Wind presses against my cheeks, chanting a wild earth song as my pony’s hooves drum the ground.”

The end captures the true horror of the massacre, and we feel the overwhelming sadness and pain of Hides Inside and his people as they suffer the full extent of their betrayal by white soldiers.  Reading Hard Face Moon is a far more meaningful way for students to learn about what happened that awful day at Big Sandy Creek than reading from a textbook could ever be.

Ms. Oswald provides an Author’s Note to help with the historical context, as well as a Timeline of Events and a bibliography for those who want to read more.

Back to The Morning Gift. It tells the story of Ruth Berger, a young Jewish girl living in Vienna when Hitler first comes to power. She is left behind when the rest of her family flees, because of some political activism she had been involved in. In sweeps the dashing Quinton Somerville, brilliant scholar, paleontologist, and adventurer; and when all his other attempts to get her out of the country fail, he marries her. The marriage will be quickly annulled once Ruth is safely settled in Britain, since she is the devoted girlfriend of a soon to be world famous pianist.

Ruth and Quin had first met when she was a child and Quin was a protegee of her father, a highly regarded professor of paleontology in Vienna. Several years later Quin returns to Vienna to accept an award, only to discover that Professor Berger has been forced out. When Quin stops by the Berger home, he finds Ruth, despondent and inventing crazy schemes to somehow get herself to England and join her frantic family.

The book is quite long, 410 pages, and has a large cast of characters. Ruth’s family, extended family, many friends of her parents, as well as the new friends she makes when she enrolls in a university, and that’s not everybody! We know it’s inevitable that Ruth and Quin will end up together, although they have many obstacles in their path: Ruth’s pianist boyfriend Heini, the single-minded daughter of the Vice Chancellor who has set her cap for Quin, Ruth’s own stubbornness, and various misunderstandings between them, to name a few.

Ruth’s sweetness at times strains believability. She reminds me in one way of Anne of Green Gables–she talks incessantly. But I couldn’t help liking her. I actually liked Quin better, maybe because he was older and more mature. Overall, theirs is a very sweet romance.

I’m looking forward to reading more of these re-released books. What do you think? With Valentine’s Day coming up, shouldn’t a good romance be on your nightstand?

The setting is imaginary, as in most fantasies. However, it has the feel of an English village from long ago. In fact, Bunce, in her Author’s Note, says her fantasy world “…is strongly influenced by the real woolen industries of Britain and America during the early years of the Industrial Revolution (for our purposes, the late 1700’s).” Bunce’s novel shows a true understanding of not only the business end of running a mill, but a depth of knowledge about the machinery and even the cloth.

Although the book has been summarized in various reviews as the retelling of the old fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, the plot is much more complex and layered than that. Jack Spinner, the Rumpelstiltskin character, doesn’t make an appearance until p. 96, and in 392 pages, only shows up a few times. However, he is the one responsible, whether directly or indirectly (through her evil uncle), for most of the main character’s problems.

Bunce writes beautiful prose, with rich, descriptive language. She uses words and expressions suited to the time period, such as eldritch-had to look that one up. So it bothered me a little that we couldn’t just know the time period instead of having to guess at it.

Her main characters, two sisters named Charlotte and Rosie, take over the family woolen mill after their father’s death. Since he was a poor manager, they’re saddled with plenty of debt and no extra money to pay it off. It doesn’t help that the mill has had a curse placed on it, explaining all the ill luck over many generations. Or that Charlotte doesn’t believe in curses or any of the superstitions involving the mill. Enter Jack Spinner, who spins straw into golden thread, enabling the girls to pay down some of their debt.  Jack Spinner turns up again, and as in the fairy tale, demands a higher price each time he helps them.

Why did Charlotte stubbornly refuse to confide in her good and kind husband Randall, especially when her world was collapsing? He obviously loved her and did not understand her lack of trust in him. I didn’t either.

ALA recently announced that A Curse Dark as Gold has been nominated for the William C. Morris Award for a debut YA novel. This was certainly an impressive debut. I’m sure we’ll see a lot more from Elizabeth C. Bunce.

If you’ve read it, what did you think? Did you like it as well as Harry Potter? The Twilight Series?