The Kingmaker’s Daughter (Philippa Gregory)

In my eyes, Philippa Gregory can do no wrong. She introduced me to historical fiction as a genre (before which I assumed it was all Georgette Hayer) and aroused my fascination with the British royal family. She broadened my literary horizons.

In The Kingmaker’s Daughter, Gregory takes the final step in her Cousins’ War quartet (the others are The Red Queen,The White Queen and The Lady of the Rivers) and introduces the daughters of Richard Neville, formidable Earl of Warwick.

The Earl is ‘the kingmaker’ because he orchestrates events so that only his favourites take the throne. It is little surprise, then, that he pulls the political strings for Anne and Isabel too – not of love for them, but of a thirst for power and control.

England being what it is in the fifteenth century, it’s not long before the Earl makes war on his former friends. And Anne, married off at age fourteen, must face early widowhood, a second marriage, intrigues and conspiracies, and the loss of her mother and sister (one to house arrest and the other to the enemy camp).

The New York Post has described this series as a tale of “royal witches, philanderers and kingslayers” and this novel as “the story of King Richard III's wife, Anne Neville, who went from the marital bed of one royal prince to that of another king-to-be during this long family feud.” I can’t improve much on that summary. This is another goodie.

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The Lady of the Rivers (Philippa Gregory)

She’s done it again.

Philippa Gregory isn’t known as the queen of historical fiction for nothing. In this, the third part of her Cousins / War of the Roses series, she goes further back in time than usual (and further back than either The White Queen or The Red Queen).

The Lady of the Rivers introduces us to Jacquetta: young bride to the English regent of France, the Duke of Bedford.

Descended from Melusina, the fabled river goddess, Jacquetta has always had the gift of ‘sight’ – but, having watched Joan of Arc burned at the stake for witchcraft, she understands only too well the dangers for a beautiful girl with intuitive powers.

As she grows into womanhood, Jacquetta rises to a prestigious place at the Lancaster court of King Henry VI and Queen Margaret. But she must face both the swirling threats of popular unrest and the more sinister machinations of royal rivals.

After a terrible shock, the king slides into a mysterious sleep, his volatile and easily influenced queen places her trust in scheming conspirators and bloodthirsty thugs and Richard, the grand Duke of York, threatens to snatch away the entire kingdom.

Fortunes rise and fall, as this well-researched, well-conceived and sweeping epic introduces us to the real-life mother of the White Queen. I loved this book but then, I love all of Gregory’s books. So it’s important for me to issue this disclaimer:

If you’re a Gregory fan, and your favourite of her books is The Other Boleyn Girl, there’s a chance that this novel – and the other Roses books – will prove too historical and insufficiently fictional. But if you’re a die-hard consumer of largely fact-based writing, or you’re passionate about the royals of yore and yon, you’ll love it.

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Photo credit: Google Images

The Empress of Ice Cream (Anthony Capella)

Available at all good bookstores, courtesy of Penguin Books South Africa, and on www.kalahari.net.

For my money, Anthony Capella is the master of literary deliciousness. Firstly, because he writes books about food. Okay, centred on food. And the people who produce it, eat it and love-make with it. And secondly, because his characters, plots, and colour are utterly yummy. (If a leetle simplistic and one-dimensional.)

In this, his fourth novel, following in the lip-smacking footsteps of The Food of Love, The Wedding Officer and The Various Flavours of Coffee (one of my favourites), Carlo Demirco is the dashing Italian confectioner-to-the-king who rises from nothingness to be vaunted by the French and English courts.

What does he confection? Cream ice. Or rather, ice cream. [There was a bit of Italian-to-English translation confusion, you see, and the term 'ice cream' was born.]

In short, Signor Demirco is the god of creating smooth, sultry, addictive ice cream in fruity, herby and other flavours I'd never even considered, let alone heard of (pippin, rose petal, celery, hibiscus, basil, maidenhair fern, black pepper, fig, cardamom, lavender - yum!), and his icy masterpieces, together with their exquisite and whimsical presentation, become the talk of two royal towns.

Along the way, Carlo meets Louise de Keroualle, an impoverished yet beautiful lady-in-waiting, and the two become friends, enemies and then allies as strangers to England and to the awkward English way of doing things. This is when the novel becomes largely Philippa Gregory-ish in its orientation... And this is when I really start to enjoy it. Because there's only so much ice cream I can dream about.

[The novel is narrated in the first person by both Carlo and Louise - not a beloved device of mine. But it works in this story. Especially since Louise is a lot like Mary Boleyn in The Other Boleyn Girl...]

So, if you're into novels focused on food, and you like historical fiction, and you're not looking for complexity, disturbia or major drama, get yourself a bowl, a spoon and this book. Bon appetit.

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The White Queen/Red Queen (Philippa Gregory)

Available at all good bookstores and on the Amazon Kindle.

Philippa Gregory’s latest two pieces of historical heaven are so tightly (incestuously, in true Tudor fashion?) intertwined as to warrant simultaneous review. So here it is…

First, The White Queen – Book I in the series Gregory calls The Cousins’ War (the original name for the War of the Roses, which pitted Lancaster against York).

Elizabeth Woodville, a young Lancastrian widow of exceptional beauty and ambition, catches the eye of the handsome, virile and newly crowned king – and marries him in secret. She is The White Queen; the York queen. But, rising to the demands of her position, Elizabeth is forced to fight, sacrifice and bewitch for the sake of her family. And, as the intrigue unfolds, her two sons – ‘the missing princes in the Tower’ – become central figures in a mystery that has confounded historians for centuries.

(Incidentally, for the historians among us, Elizabeth is indeed mother to a royal dynasty, just as her father and mother hoped she would be. She is mother of Henry VIII and her granddaughter is England's greatest queen – Elizabeth I.)

Then, there’s Elizabeth’s arch-enemy, The Red Queen, who makes a tantalising appearance as a shrewish matriarch in Book I, but earns a novel to herself in Book II.

Margaret Beaufort grows from a pious nine-year-old who wants to be Joan of Arc into a conspiring courtier who stops at nothing to see her son on England's throne. The opposite of her alluring rival, plain Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort weds warrior Edmund Tudor at age 12 and pours her ambition into his only son, Henry.

While England seethes with discord during the turbulent War of the Roses, Margaret transforms from powerless innocent into political mastermind – so that rival heirs to England's throne are killed in battle, executed or deliberately eliminated.

And now, onto the actual review…

What I have always loved about Gregory’s books is their overlaps: the fact that the evil one-dimensional bitch from one book is sometimes the ditzy heroine of another. And because The Red Queen and The White Queen cover roughly the same period from different perspectives, the reader really gets a voyeuristic sense of insight; of peeking through a dusty keyhole into a secret room in which dark things happen.

So, a thumbs-up from me. However…

Gregory is veering away from the sexy and intricate historical fiction – and here I emphasise ‘fiction’ - that she championed in A Respectable Trade, The Queen’s Fool and The Other Boleyn Girl, and towards a more accurate, sensical historical fiction – and here I emphasise ‘historical’. I like it better when she makes stuff up.

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