Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for Amazon’s Daily Deals and getting books imported immediately to my phone/Kindle for, like, $2, so I end up reading a lot of shit. Like, a lot. I should probably get Prime so I can just rent books instead. Because I should probably be embarrassed to have read as much of this as I did. I didn’t finish it. I couldn’t finish it. I’ll add an extra book to this year. Pinky swear.
Anyway, this particular piece of cow dung on paper is a historical fiction along the lines of The Other Boleyn Girl but set several centuries earlier and lacking any of its readability. It’s about a young 12th century princess named Maud, granddaughter of William the Conqueror and daughter of Henry I of England.
She’s initially married off to the Holy Roman Emperor where she shows so much darn pluck that he just wants to educate her like a man, gosh darn it! But he’s kind of a sickly dude and when he shuffles off this mortal coil, she’s spirited back to England where she is the loveliest beauty in all the land and oh so spirited and willful.
Intrigue! Incest! Bratty blond boy-kings named Geoffrey! Goddammit, if only I was re-reading Game of Thrones.
It’s a terrible book, terribly written about terrible characters. I straight up could not finish this, and I have an hour to kill on public transit every day. The sad thing is, a quick Google search tells me that much of the actually interesting stuff in the book actually happened, which means that this could have really been a good book. Maud/Matilda was the first woman ever named royal heir in the western world, how cool is that?! Instead we get the usual bull about beautiful fair-skinned women and “hooded eyes full of desire” and goddamnit if I wanted to read a crappy romance novel, I’d pick one up for even cheaper at Half Price Books.
0/5, would not bang.
Beautiful review!
I read a lot of crap, too, because I fall in to the 99 cent trap. Every single time. You’d think I’d learn.
urgh. I get the free books and I get what I pay for most of the time. The amount of snark generated by the last one was intense. Thanks for the heads up! Now, if only GoodReads had a shelf for “I never want to read this…”