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Set in the tumult and intrigue of the Wars of the Roses, The White Queen is the first novel in a series about the Plantagenets. In the same series, The Red Queen (Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother) and the latest one, The Lady of the Rivers (Elizabeth's Woodville's mother) .
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I usually try to be positive while reading any book or watching any film, and at the end I always find the good and the bad to notice. But this time I thought and thought and wasn't able to find anything positive to tell you. So, forgive me if for once I'll just briefly point out what I didn't like.
- I found it difficult to sympathize with the characters, especially the protagonist. You are supposed to feel for her for her several losses or admire her for her strength, the commoner who married a King and was mother to princes and to the next Queen of England. But you simply can't. You can just see her scheming, plotting and planning and never really "deeply feeling" something. Nor love, nor sorrow.
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- The hypothesis - based on no historical evidence - regarding Richard, Elizabeth's younger son. She perhaps outwit her enemies and substituted another boy, a page, to her second boy so he didn't "vanish" in the Tower like his elder brother but was brought up abroad . He would then return as Perkin Warbeck, the pretender executed by Henry VII in 1499. This part didn't convince me at all.
- After a while I found the insistence on theme of Melusina - the Goddess from whom Elizabeth's mother descended - and the addition of supernatural and magic here and there rather annoying. Maybe too repetitive? r
- Finally , the terrible lack in the connotative mode makes the narration, mostly in first person, sound as if we were just TOLD and not SHOWN the story.
I really wanted to like this book and I actually did as far as p. 50, more or less. But then to get to the end required a great effort from me. I'm sure this is not Philippa Gregory at her best. I can't believe this is the quality to be expected in such a best selling author. I think I should give her another chance. Any suggestion? What should I read?
Philippa Gregory's official site