Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

2010 has been called The Year of Eleanor and for good reason: there are no less than three new historical fiction novels set for release featuring the historical feminist icon, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Any novel of Eleanor should serve to illuminate the phenomenal life of a woman who, in a time when women were little but broodmares and chief cooks & bottle washers, took charge of her own destiny. Even though many details of her life have been lost to history, what we do know about Eleanor of Aquitaine is that she was a remarkably strong and capable woman....a feminist icon, if you will. A woman whose extraordinary life needs little to no embellishment. As a historian, author Alison Weir is in a position to know this more than anyone. And yet, when presented an opportunity to write a historical novel based on Eleanor's life, Weir chose to portray this formidable queen as a sex-crazed floozy. Weir's third and latest work of historical fiction, The Captive Queen, manages to morph Eleanor into Paris Hilton. This novel is just plain poor writing. The sentence structure and dialog are only slightly more sophisticated as an old-fashioned Dick and Jane reading primer. Events are so simplified that they make a mockery of the reader (even ones with no previous knowledge of historical events). The infamous conflict between Henry II of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Beckett is essentially boiled down to: "Well, I'll not let him best me again!" he vowed, and climbed in [bed] beside her. "But let us not waste time on Thomas. I came here for another purpose." [Insert yet another sex scene here] Or how about this exchange when Henry, his son Geoffrey, and Thomas Beckett come across a beggar: "Who is that man?" Geoffrey asked. "He is a poor vagrant," Henry explained. See Spot Run. I couldn't help but cringe. In any historical novel, the author faces the obstacle of providing necessary background information to the reader without sounding like a dried-up history textbook. Frequently, character dialog is used for this purpose, but Weir's attempt is clumsy and awkward at best: "Unfortunately, he was married to the sister of that awful Thibaut, Count of Blois, who tried to abduct me, remember?" (Eleanor of Aquitaine to her husband Henry II, of England) Now how awkward is that? Of course Henry would remember his wife's near abduction, which took place a mere two years before this conversation and was even related to the readers of this novel in a five-page scene less than 50 pages prior to this one. Exactly who did Weir fear would forget? Examples of this poor writing continue throughout the novel, such as when Eleanor comes upon her young son, William, fraught with fever: "When did this come on?" she asked, her voice abrupt with terror. "An hour ago, lady," Alice, William's nurse, replied. There were tears of distress-and fear-in her eyes. "Young ones of that age - he's not yet three - take ill quickly; they're up and down like windmills." I was left wondering why a nurse would need to remind a mother of her own child's age. It's meant, of course, to inform the reader but is a decidedly clumsy way of going about it. Inconsistencies abound throughout the book. In one scene we are plausibly treated to Eleanor handing over her newborn eldest son to a wet nurse - a commonplace occurrence for women of her rank during that time. Fast forward a couple of chapters and we find Eleanor offering her breast to this same child more than a year later. Nursing mothers everywhere will raise their eyebrows. (Indeed, I don't understand how Weir, a mother of two herself, managed to insert such a biological impossibility.) And while Weir's historical inaccuracies might have been forgiven (it is, after all, a work of fiction), she leaves us with a puzzling author's note that extolls the virtues of accurate historical detail. I'm still scratching our head over that one. All in all, this novel was a mess, which is rather disappointing considering that Weir's previous two historical fiction attempts showed promise. Perhaps her next novel will show a resurgence of her prior talent and we can quietly forget Captive Queen.