The Hidden Land by Pamela Dean (reread)
The White Queen by Philippa Gregory
The Secret Country by Pamela Dean (reread)
Jenna Starborn by Sharon Shinn (reread)
Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn (reread)
College of Magicks by Caroline Stevermer (reread)
The Court of the Air by Stephen Hunt
Extraordinary Canadians: Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell
This was a month of rereads because I never made it to the library (missed two reserves that way, argh), couldn’t afford to buy new books, and then it was too close to various gift-giving occasions. It was kind of lacklustre month, reading-wise. I revisited old favourites (Stevermer) and not-very-challenging stuff (Shinn) but then hit the Pamela Dean books, which make my quotation-repository part of my brain work hard.
Brief notes:
Every time I finish College of Magicks I am reminded of how brilliant a read it is.
I wanted to enjoy The Court of the Air much more than I did. I found it very hard to hold on to the thread of what as actually happening, since there was so much going on in different plotlines. It was a fabulous world, but I had trouble empathising with the main characters, and the villain was just insane, so there wasn’t much to empathise with there, either. It didn’t feel very immediate, somehow; a bit scattered and crammed. And every time it came close to the reader, it jumped away again. Eventually I’ll get to The Kingdom Beyond the Waves, because it’s on my shelf, but not any time soon. (I don’t usually buy more than the first book in a series by a new-to-me author, but I received these two in a draw.)
The White Queen helped shore up my knowledge of the Wars of the Roses, which was woefully patchy and skewed time-wise. For some reason I’d always thought there was more of a gap between that part of the Lancaster/York dynasty and the Tudor one. It would be helpful if not everyone was called Elizabeth, Henry, Richard, or Margaret, though. I kind of liked Gregory’s envisioning of what might have happened and people’s motivations.
i wanted to read the white queen but i was disapointed with her “the other queen” which was meh. And i agree about the name thing!
I’m about halfway through The White Queen and the names are really beginning to bug me! But I’m still enjoying it, and I also was very ignorant about this whole pre-Tudor period.
And College of Magicks is a book that I reread about once a year. Wasn’t as crazy about the sequel, though I still enjoyed the characters, as always.
xox
Yes, The Other Queen was pretty forgettable. I know I read it only a couple of months ago, and I can’t remember anything about it. I preferred The White Queen, but it’s still not as good as her earlier Tudor stuff.
A better family tree would have helped, too. As it is, she leaves the tree at the start of the book, with only the characters of the start of the book listed. She should have had a back of the book trees showing, in some detail, everyone, plus a Characters list, with all of the characters, with their full names and titles, so that you’d know, for example, that someone was Duke of Somerset as well as named John, or whatever.
My main problem was that i had never heard of the protagonist, Elizabeth. Also—and this is a biggie–I was under the Shakespearean illusion that Richard III had a hunchback. Hence I didn’t recognize him as the Richard who would be Richard III for most of the book. I kept wondering who these three York boys, Richard, George and Edward, were. An end-note about the whole “Richard III recovery” business, started I think in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, would have been helpful as a reminder.
I knew about Elizabeth Woodville, as I’ve come across mention of the accusations against her and her mother as witches. And I recognized most of the main York family, as they’re in Shakespeare’s Richard III. But I do heartily second the wish for a good genealogical table somewhere in the book; I kept flipping to the front and back and remembering belatedly that the publisher didn’t see fit to include one.