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.

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.

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?

This opens new opportunities for fiction writers who may want to do some speculating about what exactly happened during that time. Did Shakespeare continue his studies? Did he work? Fall in love? Was he an athlete? Did he poach deer from Sir Thomas Lucy’s land? Since no one really knows, anything goes!

Or does it? It seems to me that historical fiction must be grounded in the few facts we know, or that can be guessed at based on pretty solid evidence.

One YA novel in which a young Shakespeare is a main character is Carolyn Meyer’s Loving Will Shakespeare. It’s actually told from Anne Hathaway’s point of view. Meyer does an excellent job of mixing facts with her own creative insights.

One can only imagine what Shakespeare’s early marriage at age 18, to a woman eight years his senior, must have been like. Meyer depicts Anne as very much in love with young Will, and he a somewhat reluctant husband who is quickly drawn away to forge a career as a playwright and actor in London. It’s a world Anne will never be a part of, and the novel shows us her increasing unhappiness as her husband leaves her for longer and longer periods of time.

The book is filled with accurate period detail, rich language, and overall is a pretty realistic picture of what the relationship between Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway might have been like.

I recently came across a really impressive middle grade historical novel. It’s CROOKED RIVER, by Shelly Pearsall. It was published a few years ago, but somehow I managed to miss it until now. Set in 1812, it’s the story of a family on the Ohio frontier and what happens when the father brings an Indian to their home to be imprisoned while he awaits trial for the murder of a trapper. The father is a cruel and vindictive man, with little empathy for anyone, even his own daughters.

The narrator of the story is a young girl, who at first is horrified at the idea of a “savage” living in their home. The care of “Indian John” is left to Rebecca–called Reb– and her sister Laura, while the men of the family are off working in the fields each day. The two girls are desperately afraid of him at first. After a visit from a white man who is a friend of Indian John, and plans to defend him at his trial, they come to believe in his innocence. Because they are kind to him, he begins leaving small gifts for Reb.

Indian John tells his own story in poetry, mixing words from his Ojibwe language in with English. Gradually, the reader, along with the two sisters, discovers the truth. John’s trial is a sham and he is sentenced to hang. With the help of the “Thunder Beings” from the spiritual world, and human intervention from Reb, tragedy is averted.

This is a powerful story, compelling and suspenseful until the very end. Reb takes positive steps to save John, and we never doubt that this will be a turning point in her life.