Not So Good To Be Queen

Being inspired by my trip to the Renaissance Festival I read the book The Wild Queen by Carolyn Meyer. This book would probably be considered historical fiction by most folks and follows the life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots .  This book is part of the authors Young Royals series, of which I have read several and have enjoyed the mix of history and fiction.  The books are about real life people, and contain their real history that has been embellished with what author has written to fill in the day to day conversations and such (does that make sense).  As always SPOILERS AHEAD (well only if you don't know your history).

The plot of this one is interesting because it is based on the actual recorded life of an actual person, with just certain details added in.  I do not know enough to distinguish the facts from the fiction, but from what I do know the major events are all real and recorded.  A young Mary Stuart is crowned Queen of Scotland at just six days old.  She is sent to France at the age of five to live in the household of the French monarchy where she is eventually to marry the eldest son and heir to the throne Francis.   Mary or Marie as she is now called has much family in France as her mother was from a noble house of France before she moved to Scotland to marry the King.  Mary learns much of court life and the power and lack there of a woman can wield in it. At the age of 16 she married Francis, who was a small and sickly boy who never attained his manhood.  According to the book, Mary and Francis never consummated their marriage as Francis was too delicate and child like.  Mary is named Queen Consort alongside Francis when he gains the throne after the death of his father. During this time Mary Queen of England has died and her half sister Elizabeth has claimed the throne.  Several of Mary's family feel she has a better claim to the English throne, but it all falls to naught.   Alas Francis falls ill and dies leaving Mary a widow at the age of 18 and with no power whatsoever in the country of France.  Mary returns to Scotland amid treaty discussions with England to claim her throne.

 Mary does not want to sign a treaty with England until Elizabeth names her heir in the case of Elizabeth dying with no children.  Elizabeth does not want this because she feels it will cause people to try and depose her to put Mary on the throne.  Mary is welcomed back to Scotland where against the will of almost all her advisers she marries her cousin Henry, giving in to his every wish and whim out of  a desire to please him.  This union quickly sours and other then her precious son James, no good comes from this marriage.  More arguing, fighting, treating and such occur and one fateful night the lodging where Henry is staying is blown up.  Henry is found dead and Mary is blamed for plotting to kill him.  Mary is captured by Lord Bothwell and forced to marry him (making this Mary's third husband in her young life).  They attempt to put the divided kingdom back together with John Knox pushing for a Protestant only kingdom and the devoutly Catholic Mary decreeing a policy of tolerance.  Knox has also persuaded several important people (including her bastard half brother James) that a woman will never be fit to rule a country.  Mary is captured by her brothers people who force her to abdicate in favor of her son with her brother as regent.  Mary escapes and flees to England hoping Elizabeth will help her regain her throne, even though they still have not resolved there own issues.  Mary is taken captive in England and held as prisoner for 18 years before being placed on trial for plotting Elizabeth's death.  Mary is sentenced to death and is beheaded.  Ironically her son James does ascend the throne of Scotland and later England when Elizabeth dies leaving no heirs.  All of the subsequent monarchs of England and Scotland came down through the Stuart line.

I like books like this because it makes history a bit more interesting.  I know that a lot of it is speculation or filling in the gaps, but the basic history is still present.  It get's frustrating to read these stories sometimes and realize just how powerless even a sovereign monarch can be, especially if you were female.  The reader also has the advantage of hindsight which makes you cringe at the inevitability of some of the choices these characters make.  I think the best part about this book, and books like it is that it makes me want to go find out more about the real history of these people and places.  It is a great jumping of point to see where your historical interests lie, or to discover something that never even occurred to you before.  Most people know about the big events and people in history, but a lot has been documented and discovered about other less known players and events which add an even richer layer to already known history.  This isn't really making any sense because it is hard to review just the book instead of the whole learning/discovery process so I will just let you read it for yourself.  An interesting side note if you will, I actually played Mary Stuart in the play Mary Stuart with my best friend playing Elizabeth in a meeting that never took place in real life, but in the play she took great pleasure in condemning me to death :-)  We won a couple of awards for our performance so this era will always hold a special place in my heart.  I recommend this book for anybody interested in history, historical fiction, or a way to get kids started on history in a more palatable story form.  I give this book 7 out of 10 coats of arms.

What is your favorite period in history? Do you like the fictionalized versions as a way to learn history or are you a purist history buff?  What about alternative histories where the death of Kings and Queens is really an alien plot to seed the world with pod people? 

Sins Of The Father

Time to review Bitterblue by Kristin Cashore.  It has taken me a while to put the review for this one together, because I am still trying to figure out the best way to review it.  I don't think I will go overboard with the synopsis in this one, because there is so much to it that I would just muddle it all up.  So let's start with a bare bones summation.

As always some Spoilers for all three books ahead.
Bitterblue has been the official Queen of Monsea one of the Seven Kingdoms for 8 years now.  At present her biggest struggle is to find a way to break free from the oppressive council of her advisers.  Bitterblue was thrust into the ruling of her country at the tender age of 10, when her mother was murdered by her father Leck, who had been using his Graceling power of mind control to keep a horrifying grip on the country.  Leck was killed during events in Graceling and Bitterblue assumed leadership of the broken country. While the people helping her run her country while she was still a child mean well, they have forgotten that children grow up, and Bitterblue is now an adult.  To try and learn more about her own kingdom, Bitterblue decides to go out at night in disguise among the people of her city.  Here she meets up with a clever thief, a Graceling with unknown talents and his printer friend.  Through these two Bitterblue learns that the reports she has been getting from her advisers have been falsified for some reason.  Bitterblue also starts to learn just how much havoc her father wrought upon the country.  The majority of the book is a mix of Bitterblue trying to find out who is trying to squash information from the past from being reveled, trying to become an

independent ruler, juggling her feelings for her Graceling thief, and missing her friends.  After much searching, Bitterblue finally discovers some truths about her fathers past. At some point in time Leck and his father had lost their way in the mountains that cut off Monsea from an unknown country and ended up in the Dells (which is the setting for Fire) which is more advanced then the Seven Kingdoms.  Leck spent most of his childhood in this country of Monsters and medical advancement, honing his Grace of mind control.  In a fight with Fire, the human monster, he was sent tumbling back down the mountain into Monsea where he used his powers to get adopted into the royal family.  Missing the Dells, Leck tried to recreate what he could, building his castle in the glass roofed style of the Dells, commissioning sculptures and artwork incorporating the landscape and Monsters, and terribly trying to bring about scientific advancement through experimentation on humans.  It is this last thing in particular that made Leck so horrifying and perverse.  He would use his mind powers to not only torture and kill his people, but he would compel his own advisers to do the actual harm to people.  It is the memory of what they were forced to do under the kingship of Leck that has made Bitterblues advisers (who were all around when Leck was king) to try and bury any breath of what happened during his reign. Rembering what they had done, drove most of them mad.  This cover-up was wide spread and included arson, and even murder as a way to keep the heinous past hidden.  Eventually Bitterblues friends find a tunnel that leads from Monsea to the Dells and Fire from the previous novel comes to visit Bitterblue.  The young Queen realizes what it was her father was doing and decides to spend the rest of her reign trying to heal her country through revealing the history and then addressing the problems.  There are side plots, and love stories, and all that good stuff scattered throughout the novel as well, but this is essentially the gist of it.

This is not a happy, fun-filled story by any means.  It is fairly dark and I have heard many people complain about the brutality featured in certain parts.  I understand that some people are more affected by this then others, and certain experiences may make this a painful book to read.  I did not find any of the descriptions gratuitous  I thought any mention of violence, rape and torture where done only when the story needed it to point out certain aspects of Leck's mentality.  There is also the after effects to deal with, and Bitterblue herself is border line depressive on occasion.  All this together makes it a bit of a difficult book to get through.  This book is also much less action packed then the other two book were.  The whole of the story takes place in one city, and most of it is driven by discovery and conversation   There is a heavy dose of politics and enough hemming and hawing to drive a person crazy. It seemed that most of the characters had forgotten to take their happy pills and were constantly snipping at each other in very childish ways.  The level of the arguments usually amounted to "nyah nyah nyah" which did get a tad tedious after a while.  All this being said it is not a bad book.  I actually liked that the author was willing to take us to a bit of a darker place.  The realistic after math of such a twisted leader would be pretty bleak.  The idea that some people

would just like to bury the past and try to move on, versus the people who need to have answers before any healing can properly take place is one that rings true.  The notion that people would go very far, even to the extent of murder to try and cover up a shameful past is also something we know happens in real life.  I also really enjoyed getting some insight into Leck's head.  He was a monster of epic proportions  he used his powers to hurt everybody else, and even worse took great pleasure in it.  His true talant lay not so much in mind control, but in his ability to know what would utterly break a person.  You see where even with this power Leck was unhappy, you see glimpses of a person trying desperately to get back to a time and place where he thought he was happy.  This does not give even the slightest excuse to the atrocities he perpetrated, but it makes his character that much better and gives him a motive for his cruelty.  Bitterblue herself was a decent character.  I wanted to shake her sometimes and say "You are the Queen you dummy, just do what needs to be done, you don't have to ask permission!", but when you have had guardians watching over you your whole life, it is not as easy as that.  She retained some of her sassyness from previous books, and is of a different cloth then either Katsa or Fire, so it is nice to see an author not reusing the same hero mold.  The author tries to bring in a lot of politics from the real world into the books (gay rights, education, ruling styles, etc.) to varying
degrees of success  a few of them seemed forced into the plot.  Some of the plot got muddled and confusing, I'm not 100% sure I actually understood everything I was supposed to, and the ending came on fast and disjointed. Over all I would say it was a decent book and fit into the world the author created in the previous two books very well.  It was a nice link between Graceling and Fire, which when first read do not seem to have a lot in common. This book also has some cool illustrations and maps, and a fun tongue in cheek type of glossary included, which I really enjoyed.  I give the book 6 out of 10 monster statues.
What did you think of this book?  Did it help tie the first two together?  Do you prefer action or intrigue?  Do these darker books make you think, or just cringe? How awesome was the cover of this book!?!