Katherine Longshore

Brazen by Katherine Longshore has seen a lot of hype in the reader's community since it was released in June. I know a lot of people will hate me for my views on Brazen (the third book in the Royal Circle series), but this is just my honest opinion. So, sorry in advance if I overstepped a boundary.

Seeing as I've been in a bit of a historical fiction mood, I thought I'd give it a shot. Unfortunately, after devouring books like Conn Iggulden's Wars of the Roses: Trinity and Robert Fabbri's Masters of Rome recently, I feel that Brazen was probably just a bit too childish and pedantic. I mean, it's not exactly a bad book for young adults, but for someone who's familiar with Phillipa Gregory's Tudor series, etcetera, this book is just not wow enough for me. Someone else said that Brazen doesn't particularly transcend well from YA to Adult reading, and I'm inclined to agree, because heck ... I tried to finish this book, but I couldn't.

This wasn't the first time I've read YA historical fiction either, so that's not completely the problem. The reading-level was simply too low and the writing too staccato. Basically, if I could go back in time, I'd skip this one without a second thought.

The cover's real pretty though ...

Review originally posted at:
… (mais)

Anne Boleyn is just a girl. As a lady in waiting to the queen she finds that she is always too smart and always has a comment that probably should have remained in her head. Her popularity swells as Thomas Wyatt helps her figure out how to gain favor and attention from the court and ultimately from the great King Henry VIII himself. She is playing with fire and knows she could be cast aside easily if she is not careful, tarnishing her reputation and all that her family has built.

It is clear from the writing that Katherine Longshore's Anne Boleyn is incredibly intelligent and does not hold back so as to appear less so when she is around men. I love her interpretation of how witty and flirtatious she is while still being entirely in control of her own fate.… (mais)

let me start this one out by saying that i love english royal history, or at least am starting to love it. remember richard iii? i blame that, which is the first time english class has ever gotten me into anything. so i took out tarnish because you know, anne boleyn. and i’m not going to say i knew a lot about her before reading, and maybe that affected my experience. i looked her up on wikipedia. and i do think that she’s interesting (and it was her that caused henry i don’t know what the number is to split from the catholic church) and this book did an okay job of making her seem like it.

first of all anne is a very confident and impulsive woman. she was interesting when she spoke, but i feel like her inner voice - her narration - was rather dull. i found i had to force my way through the book. and there wasn’t much conflict or tension, either, i felt. the plot needs work. the plot needs a lot of work. perhaps it was because i just came from reading a book with high stakes, and yes, that is more of the type of the book i enjoy, but i didn’t like the plot. once again, we get a bloody love triangle. (okay, so i said, i didn’t like reading cishet romances unless they stood out … but like, i thought this would stand out.) more like a love polygon, because you’ve got the stuff with percy and then you’ve got wyatt and you know that anne ends up with the king at the end. it is a Foregone Conclusion.

maybe it was just that the type of story that longshore chose to write wasn’t my preference. i realize now i would much rather read about anne boleyn’s later life, before she was executed. i see how i would have liked it, and there were some tense parts but not enough. a lot of it was sitting around and talking, or the romance part.

what i did like was the relationship with anne and mary, and anne and jane. those were a lot better than how the romance with wyatt was portrayed. and i know that anne did get together with king henry but here, it seemed very quickly brought on and it didn’t come across as strong as i would have liked.

katherine longshore, though, is great at describing things. i could picture anne’s world, the english royal court, and i could picture the dresses and the people in it and what she was seeing. i don’t think the present tense narration worked out very well in this book, though. it works for some books and it doesn’t work for others and this was one it didn’t work for. i felt disconnected to anne even though a first person perspective, while there are books that i feel fully connected to a character even though it’s third person.

anne was a good character, though. i did like her. i think that she was portrayed as being very confident and sure of herself, and also wanting to have a voice in something. that was another thing i liked. historical queens are great and anne is one of them. she stuck out in a good way and made me like her throughout the book, even if she was a little too dependent on men for my liking. (then again this is the 16th century what am i expecting.)

i give this book a 5/10 and recommend this for anyone who likes the history of the english monarchy, or anyone who likes historical romance… (mais)

This was an okay YA book about life in the court of Henry VIII. The story follows Kitty Tylney, best friend to Catherine Howard (who worms her way into marrying Henry VIII). Kitty ends up being summoned to court after Catherine marries the King.

I listened to this on audiobook and it was a well done audiobook. The narrator did a good job with character voices and portraying emotion. I would recommend listening to on audiobook if you enjoy audiobooks.

At the start of the book I enjoyed this look into what it took to get into King Henry's court and how wondrous it seemed to Kitty. However, the story ended up being a bit surfacey...it just didn't had a lot of depth. The characters, the story, and the writing all fell a bit short for me; it wasn't very engaging or anything all that special.

The ending is fairly open ended; some things are resolved and others aren’t. It was an okay way to end the story but I would have liked a look at where our heroine ended up.

Overall this was an okay historical fiction read. I enjoyed the look into King Henry VIII’s court but was disappointed at how shallow and fluffy the book was; there just wasn’t a lot of substance here. I personally wouldn’t recommend, there are much better historical fictions out there.… (mais)