The Boleyn Wife, by Brandy Purdy - Review with Book Giveaway

The Boleyn Wife

Brandy Purdy

Published in the United Kingdom as The Tudor Wife by Emily Purdy

I read this book even before it was first published independently as Vengeance Is Mine. I think everyone knows I am a friend of Purdy's, but I want to tell you that I became a friend only after reading her two books. I admired them, sought her out as a friend, and she granted me that privilege. I did an interview with Purdy which you can find here. That interview contained elements of a review, but I felt that this novel, especially with the strange scuttlebutt around its republishing, and the fact that this past week the UK edition made the London Times Sunday Colour Supplement's list of top selling books was a good time to put my opinion down once and for all. This is my honest opinion, warts and all. I have only candy coated one review in all the time I have been doing this blog, and ironically that was a book written by someone who later canned me for refusing to make nice on her own review blog.

To top that, Purdy has offered an autographed copy for someone in the United States and Canada who posts a comment on this blog, the selection being made by me on April 30.
So on to the review.

I am not a big fan of the Tudors, in spite of being distantly related on my father's side to the Boleyns. Part of the reason I am not a fan is that there are just too darn many books about them, and they are rarely any different from the others. That is one reason I liked this book. IIt simply was refreshingly different, focused on characters/historical figures on the periphery of the usual stories, and was less of a fashion show than most Tudor books.

It is the story of Anne Boleyn's sister in law Jane. Jane married the man of her dreams, George Boleyn, and promptly probed that you can't demand love. You have to inspire it. George, whose sexuality ran to both men and women, might have been able to tolerate Jane if se had just not been so entirely unpleasant, jealous, and far from fun-loving and a needy clinging wife. She, of course, thought he was just overly attached to Anne, his sister. Perhaps, but a little self examination would have told her that she could have been part of Anne's milieu and at least enjoyed George’s, Anne's and the other Gallants' companionship.
Unfortunately for everyone and I mean everyone, Jane's lack of insight and understanding proved lethal. Her jealousy led her to jump on the bandwagon when Henry listened to rumors that Anne was promiscuous. She accused her own husband of incest with his sister, hoping it would just scare him back into her bed, not get him beheaded. It almost didn't, but his integrity and loyalty to his sister caused him to cook his own goose at his treason trial. We all know the outcome. Anne, George, the Evergreen Gallants (Anne's clique) and a poor innocent minstrel were all executed on Tower Hill.

Fast forward one wife, namely Jane Seymour, the mousy little thing that produced a sickly heir then died from doing so. Next is the classic bait and switch marriage of Anna of Cleves to Henry VIII, who found her nothing like her portrait. He simply divorced her, no hard feelings, and no thunder rolled around the throne this time. (Reference to a Sir Thomas Wyatt poem.) Henry turns his attentions on a Lolita in a farthingale, Catherine Howard, and this time around Jane Boleyn goes the other way with the relationship. Instead of lying about the queen being promiscuous, she lies about the queen not being promiscuous and even helps her make her deadly assignations. This time when the queen gets her head cut off, so does Jane.
The novel has some problems, it's true. The sneaking about and listening to private intercourse of both varieties spreads a little thin, but this is inevitable with first person narratives. The narrator, usually a woman, in these novels has to have a reason she knows what is going on, and it's gotta be sneaking around, messengers running back and forth day and night, or psychic visitations -- unless you think of someone to write about who has an excuse to be everywhere at once. It ain't easy. As long as publishers insist on first person female, this sort of thing is unavoidable. The other thing I found unlikely was Jane's trust with Thomas Cromwell, a truly minor point.

The strengths of this novel, whether in its old incarnation or the expanded editions available now, more than outweigh these minor concerns. First of all, it is a fun, somewhat tongue in cheek purposefully outrageous book at times, and I found that, as I write above, admirable. Unlike too many Tudor novels it is not worshipful.  It is my far from humble opinion that all those bloggers and Amazon review writers who are incensed at the sexuality in the book are the very people who are selling the literally thousands of copies, particularly in the UK. If you don't like rampant sex in a novel, then don't read books that have it. That means never read a single book I write, as I love adding sex to my hero's lives. Further, this novel shows the Tudor court for both its sinister and silly side, vividly and lavishly, and for that I am grateful.

Seriously there is one theme in this book that quite touched me, and that is the courage and fidelity of the men who surrounded Anne Boleyn, all the men but Henry, that is. George Boleyn, Sir Francis Westin, Sir Thomas Wyatt, and the others, all could have turned state's evidence on Anne, but they chose to stick by her, to tell the truth, to accept the political reality that this integrity would not be used in their defense. The execution scenes of these men are heartbreaking. I was deeply touched, and frankly haunted by the scenes ever after. This is what this book is all about. It is about what loyalty and friendship really are, and how it happens because of the goodness and affection of the people involved and for no other reason.

I have the advantage writing this review so late in the game to be able to comment on some of the bizarre criticisms of the book. A few crackpots accuse Purdy and her publishers of trying to pull a fast one by having the book published at one time or another under three different titles. Hello! This is a commonplace in book publishing. Why people get so bent out of shape about this is beyond me. All it demonstrates is the lack of knowledge of and crackpotness of the critics who focus on this issue.

I look forward to Purdy's next books. I just adored The Confession of Piers Gaveston. I am sad it has not yet been picked up by a mainstream publisher. Purdy, by the way, gave me the digital copy of the book as a gift and also for this review. I have since bought it and it is in a place of honor on my bookshelf.Remnember, if you would like to enter the drawing for a fgree autographed cope and you live in the US or Canada, just leave a comment, and I will select a name randomly on April 30.

The Ringed Castle, by Dorothy Dunnett (Lymond Chronicles #5)

The Ringed Castle

Dorothy Dunnett

Lymond Chronicles, Volume 5

Well, here it is, the second to last volume in the Lymond Chronicles.  I shiver thinking that I have only one more before I have read them all, and Lymond will be out of my life.  As if.  Like just about every other nut about the series, I will read, re-read and then read a third time.

Let me just say the end of this novel is nothing like the beginning.  We find Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny in Ivan the Terrible's Russia.  He is the supreme commander of the Czar's military forces, and by all appearances has completed his personal transformation into a cold, calculating machine.  This serves him well in his present position, where ruthlessness is king.  He has an unstable Ivan to manage, a resentful and murderous aristocracy to defend himself and the men of St. Mary's from, and, thank heavens, Philippa safely in England.  No, wait, Philippa is never safely anywhere... but at least her attempt to join him in Russia is foiled.  I would not have put it past her, but frankly I just was not ready for that.

While Lymond works to keep the Czar on task to rid Russia of the Tartars and thereby free the backward, zenophobic empire to get with the Renaissance, Philppa is a lady in waiting for the new queen, Mary Tudor.  The plots and conspiracies are just too much for Philppa, who, while investigating Lymond's origins and half-heartedly seeking her annulment from him, gets herself embroiled with some dangerous folks, including the great mathematician, alchemist and astrologer, John Dee.  Margaret Lenox is aiming to trip her up however she can, just to get her former boy lover's goat.

Enter a wonderful new character, the factual Richard Chancellor,  one of the first navbigators to reach Russia by going north of Scandinavbia.  He and Lymond become friends.  Chancellor, in fact, was told by Margaret, who is riding high on the return of Catholicism to England, and who is shooting for her son, Lord Darnley, to become the next king, to warn our hero of dire consequences to himself and his loved ones if he does not come back to Scotland. Chancellor, whom she threatened to charge with heresy, does not inform Lymond until he absolutely has to, but manages to save his life during one of the promised attacks.  It becomes clear that someone in either Lymond's or Chancellor's party is the culprit. 

Everything starts to change when Ivan is convinced to send his best buddy and commander of all his armies to England to get Mary and her new husband, Philip of Spain, to give him weapons.  After a grueling voyage and tragedy, Lymond is in London and sparring with his erstwhile bride.  She has learned that he is a bastard, though the story changes a couple times as to the dramatis personae, and while the dramatic events of Bloody Mary's reign unfold, Lymond confronts his enemies and his great uncle, who, it seems, has been blackmailing his mother, something becomes apparent in Lymond.  He is starting to get it.  He is starting to recognize that he too has a caring nature and that there is some good to be had from the relationships in his life.

Like most Dunnett, The Ringed Castle  s a mix of psychological drama, expert character development, absurd plot lines that you wouldn't miss for the world, and the totality a novel where you can't, tense and expectant, put the book down.  During the reading of this volume, I went from thinking "The approapriate approach to reading Lymond is alarm, to the appropriate approach being intense anxiety.  This magnificent self-destructive, brilliant, infuriating man is capable of anything, no matter how splendid or ridiculous.

I told someone the other day that the Lymond chronicles are like Mt. McKinley in Alaska.  When you look for it on the horizon you see the mountain range.  Scanning it you try to detect the tallest peak.  None seem to top the others.  Then.. you look above the clouds, and there, towering over the rest and as wide as several together, is McKinley.  The Lymond Chronicles are to all other books I have read what McKingley is to the other mountains.  No comparison.

I received this book from the Library for the Blind, unfortunately on one of their old cassettes.  Four sides of it had about an eight minute gap thanks to a twisted tape.  I look forward to when they get the Dunnett books onto the digital media where such problems are -- almost -- impossible.

OK, time to grit my teeth and send for Chckmate, volume six of the six-volume Lymond Chronicles

The Stolen Crown, by Susan Higginbotham

The Stolen Crown: The Secret Marriage that Forever Changed the Fate of England

Susan Higginbotham

Ever since Josephine Tey’s historical detective novel, The Daughter of Time, came out decades ago, the last Yorkist king, Richard III, has gained a passionate fandom. The novel featured a bedridden Scotland Yard investigator offered historical mysteries to pass the long hours of inactivity. In investigating the disappearance of the “little princes”, namely the teenaged King Edward V and his brother Richard, Duke of York, he dispels the monstrous image of Shakespeare’s Richard III. No more the hunchbacked killer of kings and children, but a sweet, loving, tragic figure tailor-made to make women readers rush to defend him. Since then most novels about the era have represented Richard III sympathetically, most notably Sharon Kay Penman’s beloved The Sunne in Splendour.

But not The Stolen Crown Susan Higginbotham did her research, and it is her conclusion that, except for the hunchback, Richard was no Mr. Nice Guy. He really did do all those horrible things. The erstwhile billains of the piece, the Woodville family and the Duke of Buckingham, are innocent, I tell you, innocent. I expect Higginbotham is long well prepared for the onslaught by wounded Richard lovers.

For me, the approach was rather refreshing. My partner in the stories that became An Involuntary King, Laura, turned me on to Richard groupiedom, and in fact I have an old folder around here somewhere with a drawing I did of the famous Richard portrait pasted to it. I am as big a fan of Penman’s novel as the next person, but it was a nice change to have a Richard who just might have been human. I suppose if I ever write my own Richard III, which is highly unlikely, he will be guilty but have as good reasons for his actions as possible. That is, not personal ambition but in fact to protect the stability of the realm.

In The Stolen Crown, written in first person with two different voices, you follow the lives of Katherine “Kate” Woodville and Henry “Harry” Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. The two are married when he is a preteen and she is much younger. As children they are affectionate friends, but when Kate is of an age to be bedded, they become romantic lovers. The flies in the ointment appear to be that Kate’s family, in particular Elizabeth Woodville, married secretly to the king, Edward IV, are becoming unpopular, seen as upstarts. Harry for his part has a bad habit off ticking the king off. In addition, he has an adolescent crush on Richard, Edward’s younger brother. The two are isolated from court in their Welsh border castle. When Edward dies at 40 and the greedy Richard usurps the throne, Harry finally has a place at court, to his own undoing.

I wonder if this novel would have worked better as third person. The fact that Kate and Harry are not in the thick of things very often makes depending on their accounts rather awkward. The old advice of “show, don’t tell” falls by the wayside as you rely on the couple’s knowledge, or lack of it, to get a sense of the Great Things that are passing in the world. Harry’s devotion to Richard is stated rather than explained. You must accept that Harry had good reason to attach himself to the future king, but I for one did not perceive the cause or development. That the two narrators’ voices are so little different simply confuses the dramatic potential further.

Higginbotham is a skilled writer, no question about it. More than that even it is obvious that she ate, drank and slept Wars of the Roses and did an immense amount of research. In her author’s note, the part of historical novels that is fast becoming my favorite, she outlines her research and conclusions most helpfully. For the most part I agreed with her conclusions and feel for this the novel is an important contribution to the Ricardian debate.  I would love to see more work from her in third person.

Higginbotham provided a digital version of her novel for this review, which I converted to audio with TextAloud and listened to it on my digital talking book machine.