I was actually disappointed with Alison Weir's latest, "The Lost Tudor Princess". Normally her nonfiction reads like fiction and is very engaging, but this one was a slog. The longwinded descriptions of the garments that Henry VIII gave his niece didn't really help much, although I understood she was trying to tie in the clothing she owned in order to identify portraits, but it would have been so much easier to say: "the sitter in this painting is wearing a dress that matches the fabric Henry gave Margaret in 1544" or whatever. At any rate, the subject matter was definitely interesting: Henry VIII's niece by his older sister, Margaret Tudor, Margaret Douglas, was born and lived in England, married Scottish nobility, and had eight children. Six of them died young but two of the boys grew to adulthood and married, one having a son, James, who became king of Scotland as James the VI and king of England as James I, and her other son fathered Arbella, who had a strong claim to the British throne as well. It's a shame it wasn't more enjoyable.
As a kid I loved the movie "Yours, Mine, and Ours" (the original with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, not the travesty of a remake). I never knew the mother, Helen Beardsley, wrote a book but once I found out she did I had to read it. It was very sweet and a bit sappy, but a nice, quick read. The original movie didn't stray too far from the book, although apparently (at least according to Helen) all the kids were for their parents marrying, no one protested like in the film, and they moved into Frank's house, which they renovated and added onto. If you don't know the story, it's about a Navy widow with eight children who meets and falls in love with a Navy widower with ten kids. They marry and have two more kids together. It reminds me, of course, of the lovely Gilbreth family of "Cheaper by the Dozen".
David Horspool's "Richard III" was very even and unbiased. He took a fair look at the known facts about Richard III and laid them out for the reader to decide how to interpret them. It was very good, I enjoyed it, although he could have made it a bit easier on the reader by translating the original documents from their native spelling. Those were difficult to decipher and broke up the natural flow of the book to all of a sudden be confronted with a nearly foreign language. I greatly admire those scholars who spend so much time trying to read the handwriting of those letters and documents and figure them out. Lord knows I couldn't do it.
I had high expectations for Bill Clegg's "Did You Ever Have a Family". I read so many book reviews for work, and the buzz around this book before it was published was astronomical. I was expecting something quite magnificent. What I got was...well, a decent story, and I liked it, but I think I would have liked it more if I hadn't been aware of all the hype. On the morning of their wedding, Lolly and Will are killed in a house fire, along with Lolly's father and Lolly's mother's boyfriend, Luke. Lolly's mother June is the only survivor of the family and after the funeral she takes off. The book is not really about her journey, she ends up in a hotel on the West Coast, but more about the lives of the people around her and how they all end up intersected. It was a nice message about how even when we think we're alone we really aren't, but other than that I didn't get much out of it.
No comments:
Post a Comment