Sunday, December 17, 2006

Still Here!

I haven't posted lately, between reading novels for review, work deadlines, and Christmas, but I do plan to be better once things start to quiet down.

My latest novel wasn't a Plaidy, but Bridge of Sighs by Jane Lane. I've liked Jane Lane's other novels, but I found this one, about James II's wife Mary Beatrice, to be lackluster. I started thinking, "Jean Plaidy could have done better than this." I don't know if Plaidy wrote a novel about Mary Beatrice, but she did write one about James II's daughters, Mary and Anne, called The Haunted Sisters, which I hope will soon be in my hands.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad about the Mary Beatrice novel. I recently read a book of Lane's called Sow the Tempest, about Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and while the writing was decent, I could definately tell right away who Lane thought the "good guys" and the "bad guys" were.

Carla said...

I have a copy of The Haunted Sisters. It's a while since I read it, but I remember I liked it. Sarah Churchill comes over well. There's a sequel, if you like it, called The Queen's Favourite, I think, which covers Anne's reign and the fall of Sarah Churchill and rise of Abigail Hill.
Have you come across any good novels on John Churchill Duke of Marlborough, by the way? He sounds an interesting man.

Anonymous said...

I believe that Winston Churchill wrote a bit about John Churchill, being one of the latter's descendents. In terms of fiction, though, Susan Holloway Scott has a novel out about Sarah Churchill that's supposed to feature John Churchill quite a bit as well. I haven't read it yet, so I can't tell you about the quality.

Susan Higginbotham said...

Deidre--Jane Lane definitely doesn't make a secret of where her sympathies lie!

Carla, I'll have to look for The Queen's Favorite!

Both--I bought the Scott novel a while back The writing seemed good, but I only read a couple of chapters because I found Sarah Churchill, the narrator, offputting in the way she kept telling the reader how well she had handled a given situation. But maybe that was just her personality that the author was capturing . . .