I am, if anyone hadn't guessed thus far, a massive fan of Jean Plaidy. Whilst having little to no interest in the Plantagenet dynasty before now I suddenly find myself enthralled, almost entirely through her wonderful writings, and gaining new knowledge day by day of the period. Plaidy books are ...
Nobody writes British historical fiction better than Jean Plaidy. And this novel is Plaidy at her best. Focuses on the lives of the powerful and scheming nobleman John of Gaunt, and his passionate love, Katherine Swynford, Edward the Black Prince and his wife Joan of Kent and his son Richard II. ...
I've had some expectations about this book - the story was too good to screw up and the autor had written dozens of books before this one.Somehow I knew it was too good to be true.The story is good but the writing.... It is so incerdibly simple, with such a small wocabulary, that it read like one...
2.5 starsEpitaph for Three Women turned out to be far less about these three women than I was led to believe by the book's description. Broken into three parts titled Katherine of Valois, Joan of Arc, and Eleanor of Gloucester, only Joan, or Jeannette rather, has an actual story that follows her ...
The Prince of Darkness is the book about the youngest son of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II of England. Together they had 5 sons and 3 daughters. William the eldest died before his third birthday. Henry, the Young King, was crowned by his father the King when he was 15 years old and died when ...
I enjoyed reading Plaidy's account of the early life and childhood of the boy who would become King Henry V, especially the female POV of his mother, an all too often ignored figure, in the early chapters. I barely knew that Henry had 2 sisters as well as his 3 more famous brothers. The first pa...
Wow, That's a Lot of History.This is the first Jean Plaidy novel I've read. I recently read Hilda Lewis' 'Harlot Queen' which offers greater detail of the reign of Edward II and Edward III's succession to the throne. 'The Vow on the Heron' briefly touches on the succession of Edward III and how...
The Revolt of the Eaglets is a direct sequel to Jean Plaidy's The Plantagenet Prelude. This 1977 entry was part of her never-ending quest to fictionalize each and every aspect of British history. This novel picks up just after the end of the last one. Thomas a Becket has just been murdered and th...
I love Jean Plaidy's Plantagenet work! The literary world lost a great historical novelist when she died. I sometimes have a hard time getting into old books because of the totally different writing style of way-back-when, but Jean Plaidy always manages to get me immersed. She LIVED this! It amaz...
Quite a good book focused on the life an reign of one of the perhaps lesser known Kings of England, Henry III and his relationship with his French Queen Eleanor de Provence. Henry not only devoted but was one of the rare kings who was faithful to his wife, but his devotion proved to be a double e...