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The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

Tag Archives: historical fiction

Review of The Girl on the Golden Coin

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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book review, girl on the golden coin, Historical Cavaliers, historical fiction, history, seventeenth century, stuarts

I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front recently, mainly because my wedding is getting ever closer – less than three weeks now – meaning I’m spending far more time looking critically at flowers and cakes than typing merrily away. On the plus side, in an attempt to keep my sanity intact, I’ve been reading loads, and have developed quite the back-log of reviews.

My last post was a list of my planned summer reading, and I described one of the entries on it like this:

“Precisely because I love history so much, I tend to be slightly wary of historical fiction, but from what I hear, this Restoration-era novel about Lady Frances Stewart is both well written and well researched, as well as full of intrigue. And more importantly, the main character marries the son of the real-life Lord George Stewart.”

On that basis, of all the books I’ve read recently, The Girl on the Golden Coin seemed by far the most fitting to review, especially as I read most of during a trip to Oxford to meet with my wedding photographer (who incidentally took some amazing practice shots)

So did the book deliver?

THE GIRL ON THE GOLDEN COIN – MARCI JEFFERSON

THE BLURB

Impoverished and exiled to the French countryside after the overthrow of the English Crown, Frances Stuart survives merely by her blood-relation to the Stuart Royals. But in 1660, the Restoration of Stuart Monarchy in England returns her family to favor. Frances discards threadbare gowns and springs to gilded Fontainebleau Palace, where she soon catches King Louis XIV’s eye. But Frances is no ordinary court beauty, she has Stuart secrets to keep and people to protect. The king turns vengeful when she rejects his offer to become his Official Mistress. He banishes her to England with orders to seduce King Charles II and stop a war.

Armed in pearls and silk, Frances maneuvers through the political turbulence of Whitehall Palace, but still can’t afford to stir a scandal. Her tactic to inspire King Charles to greatness captivates him. He believes her love can make him an honest man and even chooses Frances to pose as Britannia for England’s coins. Frances survives the Great Fire, the Great Plague, and the debauchery of the Restoration Court, yet loses her heart to the very king she must control. Until she is forced to choose between love or war.

On the eve of England’s Glorious Revolution, James II forces Frances to decide whether to remain loyal to her Stuart heritage or, like England, make her stand for Liberty. Her portrait as Britannia is minted on every copper coin. There she remains for generations, an enduring symbol of Britain’s independent spirit and her own struggle for freedom.

 

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MY REVIEW- 3 STARS

I love history, and the Stuart period is a particular favourite of mine – and one that often tends to get neglected by novelists and film makers in favour of the Tudor and Georgian periods that bracket it. Charles II is probably my favourite English King, and I also have a soft spot for Louis XIV and his French court, so this book was really quite an easy sell for me. I was expecting sex, glamour and intrigue – and it’s fair to say it delivered on some of those points and less so on others.

This wasn’t just a general book about the Restoration court. It focussed firmly on the adventures of one woman, Frances Stuart, and as a result, it was always going to stand or fall by a combination of how interesting that character was in real life and how sympathetic and intriguing the author managed to make her. Despite the fact that I used to study history reasonably seriously, I’ve always been far more interested in individuals than in grand, sweeping narratives or battles, so I was all ready for the author to make me develop a massive girl crush of Ms Stuart. Sadly, she mostly didn’t deliver. I went into this book knowing a handful of things about the character – that she’d been a mistress of Charles II, that she was very beautiful and set the fashions of the times, and that she eventually married a character I’d better not name for fear of spoilers (*see footnote), but who I was very interested in hearing more about. By the end of the book, I didn’t feel I’d learnt that much more about her, or forged any kind of real connection.

It’s probably a bit unfair to compare what’s basically a classier than average historical romance with a modern masterpiece, but I couldn’t help contrasting this with my experience of reading Wolf Hall, which also looked at historical events through the eyes of a character who is usually in the background of traditional retellings of the period. By the end of that, I felt that I knew Thomas Cromwell better than my best friends and that I would cheer him on whatever he did. Here, I struggled to get any understanding of Stuart’s motivations or real personality. Did she want to sleep with the French King or was his pursuit stressful and relentless? How about the English King? Who did she want to marry? Her approach to life seemed to vacillate wildly from one moment to the next, and I never knew quite what outcome I should be routing for. To makes matters worse, it was never quite clear what King Charles saw in her apart from her extreme beauty – which is probably quite historically accurate, but makes for a dull read. Throughout, I felt far more interested (and on the verge of cheering for) Frances’ main rival, Lady Castelmaine, who was also beautiful, but who combined it with wit, intelligence and some entertaining scheming.

On the plus side, rooms, clothes and events were lavishly described, and I got a real sense of what life was like for the wealthy and titled in this period. Some of the romance was very sweet and although it was never particularly graphic, some of the sex was really quite hot – indeed it was more interesting because of both the characters’ and the author’s restraint.

The blurb, some of the internet buzz, and the gorgeously classy cover gave me the impression that this was going to be about more than just romance, and that as well as who was sleeping with who, the book would delve into the politics of the time. Despite a few token references to religious conflict and wars, it fundamentally failed to deliver on this point. I haven’t marked it down for this, as it’s no crime for a book not to be quite the genre I was expecting, but if you’re considering whether or not to read this, it’s worth bearing in mind that it is basically just a standard historical romance. Similarly, I disagreed with some of the author’s interpretations of historical events (if you ask me, Louis XIV loved Charles I’s sister, and Frances Stuart loved her eventual husband to the extent she’d defy the king’s wrath to be with him) but again, that hasn’t affected my score – the author had clearly done some research, and part of the fun of history is that people can reach very different conclusions from the same source material.

So, to read or not to read? If you enjoy historical romance and either like the period or are looking for something slightly different, you may well enjoy this. It’s glamorous, sexy and fun, and a fairly easy read. Just don’t expect much from the main character, or much historical context.

*That’s what I wrote in my Goodreads review. I think the not revealing Frances’ eventual husband ship has rather sailed as far as this blog post is concerned, so I’ll just come right out and say I did not like the author’s portrayal of Lord Stewart Junior one little bit, but that’s just because I irrationally wanted him to read like my completely made up portrayal of his father.

 

Why I Like Vampire Novels so much – Parts One and Two: History and Folklore

21 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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folklore, historical fiction, personal, vampire fiction, vampires, why I like vampire novels series

Every night this week, I’m writing about some of the reasons I love reading and writing vampire novels. If you haven’t already read my intro, check it out here, so we’re clear what sort of vampire books I’m talking about – Introduction Oh and in case you’ve come across this blog randomly, all the title quotes are from my series, The Cavaliers. Grant me a little self-indulgence!

Tonight, we’re dealing with reasons one and two:

  1. History without the baggage
  2. Folklore, tradition and magic

1)History without the baggage

“Harriet thought about the 1920s, one of her favourite periods of history. She was struggling to understand that he had lived through them, had that glorious interwar experience.”

As I think would probably be clear to anyone who’s either read Oxford Blood or spent much time on this blog, I absolutely love history. It was my university degree and it’s an ongoing personal passion. I quite enjoy full blown historical fiction, but only in fairly small doses and only if it’s really well done

There are a few seriously amazing historical fictions novels (Wolf Hall, obviously. Sarum, which tells the history of Salisbury from prehistoric times to the present day. The King’s General, by Daphne de Maurier, which has all the brilliance of her more famous works with the added fun of being set during the English Civil War). I’m seriously considering writing a proper historical novel myself at some point.

I do however have a few problems with the genre. One, unless it’s alternate history (which can be amazing if done well) you know how any major events mentioned in the book is going to end. Two, if characters act in historically authentic ways (eg in their attitudes to women or class) there are only so many ways they can develop, and if they don’t, it can feel jarring. Similarly, an author can either include lots of historical detail, drowning the plot under a pile of cravats, muslin dresses and talk of the war and the King, or they can avoid this and seem inauthentic.

With vampire novels, you can have the best of both world. Most of the plot can be set in the present day, giving the characters freedom to behave as they wish and leaving the ending open, but at the same time, you can have flashbacks to the time when the vampire characters were alive, and you can also have their original time period influence their views on the world. This is done particularly well in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, which whilst they never let facts get in the way of a good story, nevertheless gave me a good understanding of the culture of Renaissance Italy, Ancient Egypt and medieval Russia when I read them in my teens, years before I studied any of those periods properly.

The historical elements were definitely one of my favourite parts of writing Oxford Blood, and the accuracy of them is one of the aspects of the book I’m proudest of. All of this is one of the reasons that one of my golden rules of vampire writing is that at least some major characters need to have been born more than a century ago. Preferably a lot more.

2 – Folklore, tradition and magic

This follows on from the history point and is a very similar argument. I love folklore and mythology and tradition, and vampire novels can be given a liberal sprinkling of this sort of detail without it having to become the entire point of the story.

I find it fascinating how many culture, across the globe and over the centuries, have had some form of vampire legend. I find it fun to compare the differences in detail of these traditions. Oxford Blood plays with this a little, by having two sets of vampires, the Cavaliers and the Roundheads:

“George broke off from his memories. “Tell me,” he asked Harriet, watching her closely, “have you ever noticed how there are basically two sorts of vampires depending on which books you read and which films you watch?”

“You mean that there are the Anne Rice style glamorous brooding ones and then there are the old fashioned scary Nosferatu monsters?” Harriet asked nervously.

“Exactly,” George said with a hint of a smile. “It’s us and them.”

This is taken to a fabulous extreme in the Anno Dracula series, which starts from the principle that all the conflicting tales about vampires are true and pretty much every fictional vampire is real, and that the discrepancy is simply due to their being a variety of different bloodlines, each of which has very different qualities.

Beyond the vampires themselves, vampire novels are a great starting point for bringing in all sorts of other mythology, whether that’s biblical references, ideas about magic and psychic powers or ancient prophecies. I think this sort of thing can put a lot of readers off, but I love it. It comes back to my original point – if the plot would be basically the same if the vampires were human, it’s not a good vampire novel.

I’d love to hear whether you agree or disagree on my thoughts so far, or about any points you think I’ve missed from my list. If you enjoyed this, check back tomorrow for reason three: romance with meaningful tension.

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