elizabeth chadwick

My Reading Challenge for 2014.

February 20, 2014 by Merry 3 Comments

You might remember I set myself a challenge to read 50 books this year along with a variety of other things I wanted to do to try and find myself a bit after the last few years. So far, I’ve read 13 books and I’m keeping a track on the Goodreads challenge widget. I’m keeping the target loose (anything finished even if not started this year, anything listened to, anything reread that I have read before) so that I actually read in a way I will enjoy, rather than feeling I ‘have’ to read something. I love to listen to books in the evening while I craft now, it appeals to the multi-tasker in me. There is probably a whole other blog post in whether that counts as reading 🙂

I’ve re-listened to most of the Tiffany Aching stories now having fallen back in love with Pratchett thanks to them this time last year. I do love a book for children which can appeal to adults too; in fact, sometimes I think any book that can’t be accessed by people of lots of different ages is just generally lacking something. That’s not a statement I’ve given a lot of time to thinking through, btw, but I think the gentle beauty of a well written child-orientated book beats almost everything else. Tiffany is the most amazing character, who suits the narrative style of Pratchett’s books (and the reading voice of Stephen Briggs) perfectly. She’s sassy, fallible, self aware and interesting and her fantastical exploits are astonishingly believable. The groth of the character as she matures through the books is absolutely perfect and as for the Feegles… well. I miss them rattling around in my head every time I stop listening to them.

My friend Rachael Lucas served up a piece of delicious chick lit last year which has shot her to fame and all of us who keep saying we will write a book into mortified humility. She only went and actually did it. She wrote a book, published it and has got a book deal. The blooming cheek of it. Sealed with a Kiss is in the best tradition of easy reads and lovely for it. I’m so glad to have read it properly now that I can actually focus on a book for more than 5 minutes.

If you’ve not read the Rivers of London books I highly recommend them. A wizard who is a policeman written very much for adults and all set in the real world with a wonderful dose of the history and mythology of London thrown in for good measure. Clever, refreshing, funny, a bit naughty and fun to read; I just adore books that make you check google to see if a place is real – and love it any more when you discover it very much almost is 😀

The Summer Queen is a staple author favourite, all about Aelinor of Aquitaine (or Elaenor, Elinor or similar). Much better than another recent similar book I read; Elizabeth Chadwick always does her characters well.

I enjoyed The Midnight Rose, one of a number of ‘look back through family history through dual story lines’ type of book I’ve read recently. It follows the fortunes of a family in an English country home and a young Indian girl as their lives collide and separate. I don’t actually cry very often at the end of books, but I did at this one. Lovely read, kept me up till far too late at night. Similarly Wildflower Hill is built on a similar plot and tells the story of an English girl and the family she came from in Tasmania and Australia.It was delicate and delicious and I really enjoyed it – and cried too, yes.

Finishing off for now with Of Mice and Men, which I reread to support Fran who is doing it for English GCSE. I did it for GCSE too and it struck me, as it so often does, what a disservice we do to literature of great quality when we frogmarch children through it and make them revise it and note take and dissect. My memory of that book is a long, agonising, traumatic read full of essays and dull lessons. In fact, it is a brutal, touching (SHORT) book of breathtaking simplicity and, more than anything else, pictures. I’m glad to have reread it.

I also read The Knitting Circle and The Secret Keeper in the last 6 weeks, but I’m going to give them a post of their own as I have more to say about both of them than time will currently allow.

Book Review #41: The Captive Queen

September 5, 2011 by Merry Leave a Comment

Oh dear.

Alison Weir writes fabulous historical biographies; over the years I’ve read 8 or 10 of them and they’ve always been enlightening. But recently, she turned her hand to fiction (well, with all that knowledge and writing ability, why not?) and the results have been… questionable. Her book on Lady Jane was okay, on Elizabeth it was really quite good. But this one, apparently the book she always wanted to write on Eleanor of Aquitaine, was really very poor. Aside from the fact that it told her story in chronological order, it just did nothing very much at all.

Eleanor is a fascinating character and The Captive Queen could have been great. Eleanor’s life was incredibly dramatic; mother of Richard the Lionheart and ‘Bad’ King John, married to the Henry who restored order to England after the war between Stephen and Matilda and an heiress and ruler of much of what is now France in her own right. Oh my, she had a life.

Unfortunately, Weir reduced this to constant crudely dealt with sex scenes, endless drivelling about infidelity and hurt and far too much “and then we went” detail – relevant in a biography, but unnecessary in a novel. What this book needed was a damn good edit – it felt like a first draft, or one by someone now famous enough to get away with length of word count, not quality of writing. The characters were flat and tiresome, with little development and no depth.

The trouble with this era is that is is done far, FAR better by Elizabeth Chadwick. Her bit part portrayals of Henry, Eleanor and the sons are far superior and she has done fantastic novels with William Marshall and Matilda just jumping off the page. Both felt flat and intimidated in this book, like Weir knew those books and felt constrained by them and unable to develop scenes with those people in them for fear of… I don’t know? You can’t plagiarise a historical person really.

I’m not sure what the afterword comment along the lines of “this was the novel I wanted to write first but fr obvious reasons I couldn’t” meant. I can’t help wondering if this was rushed out because the Chadwick version is on the way. I suspect it will be much better though.

Book Review #24: Lady of the English by Elizabeth Chadwick

June 19, 2011 by Merry 3 Comments

I stumbled across Elizabeth Chadwick in a chance ‘I like the look of that cover” Waterstones moment and she has become absolutely my favourite historical author. I’ve read my way through all of her back catalogue and for the last year or more, all her new books (she is thankfully prolific!) have arrived on release date, either to my door or my Kindle. So far, every single one of her books has been fabulous, an enjoyable as well as an educational read and novels that have stretched my imagination and furthered my understanding of the history of England. From the Battle of Hastings onwards, she has a skill for bringing not only a cast of characters to life but also a landscape and a way of life. Aside from a few early ones, all her books feature real historical characters and events, tapestried together into an ever growing world of medieval England. Often books overlap, with characters from one popping up in another (as they would!) and often events are seen from one angle in one book and from a slightly different one in another.

There is a huge benefit to bringing characters to life in the way Elizabeth Chadwick does; even when characters have to be woven using subjective or intuitive ideas in order to create believable scenes and make a story, these historical characters become people and it is when you have an idea of a person, that it is possible to learn about them, remember them from one English Heritage trip to another and think about why they acted as they did. It was because of these books that I knew the history and the pressures on nearly all of these people, on our trip last week.

As an educator, someone trying to teach my children a real grasp of history, it is wonderful to be able to talk about these names as people to them and tell them the stories of their lives. Even allowing for the necessity for occasional creative licence with a personality, knowing the stories of 800 year old men and women makes for great days out. And as children of the Horrible Histories generation, being able to tell the story of the woman imprisoned so long she (maybe!) ate chunks from her dead son, is always going to please them!

Lady of the English is something of a triumph. It tells the story of Empress Matilda, who fought Stephen back and forth across England for a contested crown. It’s a confusing part of history at the best of times and a novel that teased out the complexities and laid bare the twists and turns of a bloody and grim civil war that is almost forgotten in today’s classrooms, seems very worthwhile. In that respect, it is excellent, easy to understand and a good insight into some forgotten history from the days well before succession in the monarchy was clear cut.

Far more than that though, the story of Matilda has been told incredibly skilfully, especially as she has already popped up in many of Chadwick’s other novels in her most common guise; that of a cold, hard and difficult woman who few found it easy to care for. Matilda has, inevitably, had the treatment that most strong women in history get – any strength is portrayed as unwomanly and dislikeable and she is generally seen as someone of few likeable traits who pulled England through war; Stephen, weak and malleable as he perhaps was, manages to avoid the tarnish of ineffectual monarch. Lady of the English utterly pulls this apart; while retaining all of Matilda’s well documented personality traits, a story and a concept has been created to explain why she was as she was and to make them admirable as well as daunting. The result is an entirely believable and interesting ‘other side’ to the story of the Empress and the world of women and men, treachery, loyalty and love that made up the intrigues of court life.

As ever, bravo!

Elizabeth Chadwick Reviews with added Kindle

January 15, 2011 by Merry 18 Comments

Not a sponsored post – just me enjoying books and birthday presents 😉

I’m an avid Elizabeth Chadwick fan; I don’t think I have yet read one that didn’t feel completely satisfying from start to finish – and she’s got a fair old number of them (and I’ve read them all) so that’s a reasonable achievement. She covers a part of history that was immortalised in my A Level history lesson on the very first morning. “The time up until the Wars of the Roses was thrilling ,exciting and interesting. We’re going to begin just after that, at the Tudors.” 🙄 Well done Mrs Armstrong. Killed it stone dead 😆 Chadwick’s books range from the time of the Norman Conquest up to and beyond the reign of King John (now THERE is a Bad King if ever I saw one!) and really add some fire and colour to a time that otherwise gets too ignored in my opinion.

Book #2 of the year is The Leopard Unleashed is a re-release, with some overhauling, of one of her earliest novels, from the time when she wrote of fictional characters within accurate historical periods of time. As such, her prefaces suggest she feels slightly embarrassed by these now, having moved on to real people from history but actually, so long as you remember hey are not as factual as others, they make a cracking read and are full enough of life, love, detail and colour to be a truly enjoyable way to spend a day. This one is the last part of a trilogy and concludes a story about a family living on the English edges of Wales. The strength is in the description of the life the ex-Normans had as they strove to be in charge and curtail the indignation of the English and Welsh, fighting for a place on the land while embroiled in their own internal court struggles. Does make you realise why we’re all so mixed up 😆

Book #3 is To Defy a King which, had I not had a Kindle, I would have had to wait for as I hate hardbacks and it isn’t out in paperback yet. This is the story of Mahelt Marshall, also known as Matilda among other things, daughter of William Marshall whose story is told inThe Greatest Knight: The Story of William Marshal which was the first of the book I read by Chadwick. It’s effectively the other side of the story to the second book about him The Scarlet Lion, with Mahelt married into the Bigod family (who lived at Framlingham). That’s a blog worth looking at btw, although googling for that particular entry last week, to check a pronunciation managed to be ‘one of those moments’ as it was written the day Freddie died.

With the emphasis being on the role of women in the major houses and how they were both vital for marriage and domestic running of castles but also almost helplessly buffeted by the forces of politics, it’s a book well worth reading. It’ll be a little while before they get handed on to Fran as they have some mild sex scenes which I don’t think she’d cope with yet but as living history, i really think both books are well worth a read.

Which leads me on to what I think of my Kindle.

Now obviously I expected to like it, or I wouldn’t have asked for one, but I’ve been really surprised by HOW MUCH I like it. I honestly, HONESTLY, can’t find a single thing about it that I don’t love. The most annoying thing about Amazon, really, is they never ever get it wrong 😆

The reading is perfect, just exactly like reading a book that magically turned into a glorified etch-a-sketch. The usability is effortless, certainly no damn harder than reading and holding a book. The 3G is quick, the Kindle shop is slick and easy to use. The buttons all make sense and the browser they have added is remarkably decent for something experimental. The feel is light and pleasant, the ability to change text size and font, line spacing and more is perfect for reading in different circumstances. The text to speech is quirky but would have uses, adding Audible to it is seamless and helpful. The ability to sort and organise is clever and makes sense.

And you will just keep looking at it and going “It’s just so… so… oooooh…. so weird but so… wow. I want one.”

I have nothing bad to say about it. Nothing at all. It’s beautiful and I love it. And I can read and knit. (Did I mention that already? 😉 ) I don’t even mind if it replaces books 😆

Max got me a Kindle Lighted Leather Cover too – it makes it a bit more book-like, which I like, and has a light, so you can read in bed – and that works very well. Very clever.

As an extra, one thing you can do is subscribe to blogs on it, for a fee. Now, I can’t see why anyone would do this (it’s about the only ‘eh?’ moment about Kindle I have had, but just for fun I added PoP to it, mainly as it made the girls laugh to see us for sale. If anyone fancied reviewing us, we’d really like it 🙂