Bet you can't guess what I spent my long weekend doing! :)
First up, Karen McManus's "The Cousins". Her books are always so much fun, with terrific twists. Even though I guessed the end to this one well in advance, it was still a good ride.
Twenty-four years earlier, the four Story siblings each got a letter from their mother, saying "You know what you did". Subsequent attempts to contact her have failed, and all four siblings insist they have no idea what they did to make their mother cut them off so completely and abruptly. Then one day each of the three grandchildren get a letter from their grandmother, inviting them to spend the summer at her exclusive resort. The cousins don't really know each other that well, but they can't pass up the opportunity to meet their grandmother and potentially find out why she cut their parents out of her life. Of course it helps that grandma is worth a ton of money and the grandkids would like their share. Once they get to the island, though, they discover that not only did their grandmother not invite them, she's really unhappy they are there and will do anything to get them to leave.
"In League with Sherlock Holmes" wasn't what I was expecting. Most of the stories didn't feature the great detective at all, they were Sherlock adjacent, as it were (one of them was about Benedict Cumberbatch, for instance). Some were pretty funny, like the one about Irene Adler's great-great-granddaughter solving a murder on the Jersey Shore to clear her BFF's name, or the serial killer who thinks he's Sherlock. Some were just kind of blah, which is par for the course with any collection of short stories.
"The Astonishing Life of August March" was whimsical (which isn't a word I use often enough). August was born in a theater (literally: his mother was an actress who gave birth to him in between acts of a play she was performing and left him in the laundry basket). The aged laundress, Eugenia Butler, raises him (sort of, honestly August raises himself) at the theater, where his education consists of watching great plays night after night. When the theater is torn down August is tossed to the streets to make his own way in life. It was a charming little story.
"A Rose for the Crown" by Anne Easter Smith was wonderful, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a fictionalized account of Richard III's mistress, the mother of his acknowledged illegitimate children, Katherine and John. Nothing is known about who this woman (or women) was in real life, so Smith has license to make up her story. Kate Haute was born on a poor peasant farm, but has the beauty, grace, and charm to be noticed by a minorly important cousin, Richard Haute. Richard arranges for Kate to come and live with him and his wife and his daughter, Anne, who is Kate's age. Kate learns how to be a gentlewoman and is eventually married: first to an old merchant who leaves her a young, well off widow, then to a cousin named George Haute. Kate is very much taken with George's attractiveness, but quickly discovers he prefers men to women and their marriage becomes a disappointing sham. Kate wants to be loved and have children. She has the good fortune to meet fifteen year old Richard Plantagenet while he's out hawking one day and the two fall for each other and quickly become lovers. It was sweet and romantic and I cried at the end when Richard died. My only quibble (and it's a very small one, but still) is that she has Kate go visit Richard shortly after his wife, Queen Anne, dies, and mentions how he looks much older than his 31 years. He was 32, actually, something Smith, as a Ricardian, should have known or at least verified.
And finally, "The
Brothers York" by Thomas Penn. I was really looking forward to this one
because of course anything new about Richard III is exciting.
Unfortunately, he relied
on historians who have been discredited and are considered very biased towards
the Tudors, like Thomas More and Polydore Vergil. He tried to make out like the
three York brothers: Edward, George, and Richard; were somehow quite unusual
for how they fought with each other and tussled over everything. They were in
fact very much a product of their times. He contradicted himself quite a bit
once Richard became king, talking about how greedy he was and how he wanted to
usurp the crown so badly he murdered his nephews, and in the next sentence how
being king was such a burden it weighed him down. He called Henry Tudor's
marriage to the former Princess Elizabeth "a true union" but Richard
was all too glad to get rid of Queen Anne and was eager to marry Elizabeth
himself (utter rot and nonsense, of course). Not to mention the little errors that
grated on me a bit: called the coronation feast the "wedding" feast,
etc. There are much better, fairer, books about Richard and his brothers out there.
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