Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Sisters of Treason by Elizabeth Fremantle

I asked and received this book through NetGalley for free. This review is not sponsored nor influenced in anyway.

Sometimes friendship appears from nowhere, like an exotic flower that seeds unexpectedly
First impressions

I've read a lot about the Tudors, and so this was an opportunity to learn about other relevant families from that time. I've only had a very broad image of Jane Grey, and while this book did not give me more information about her, the story about her sisters after her death was very compelling.

Final thoughts

But what it is, is less important that what it seems, my lady
I enjoyed the book in general. I didn't know anything about the Grey sisters, to be honest I never thought much about them even when they were very briefly mentioned in The Life of Elizabeth I, or at least the Grey family was mentioned.

My favourite character was by far Mary. I can only imagine how hard is to give a voice to this type of characters and the voice given to her was powerful. Katherine on the other side, got on my nerves often with her childish, love is all you need attitude oblivious of her own family sometimes. But at the same time, I think it was something that was probably typical on a time where the best you could hope was to "marry well". The adding of Levina Teerling added a new type of perspective on the story and was largely appreciated.

One thing that bothered me was when the Spanish representatives spoke Spanish badly. It made me wonder if some of the French sentences also had such blatant mistakes, and just the fact that I am not as fluent in French as I am in Spanish didn't allowed me to see it. This is problematic to me because, even though is a novelization of real events, this type of details shouldn't be neglected at least on my own opinion. It is true that I had access to an ARC and so it might be that these things were corrected in the final print of the book, but I cannot know for now.

This is the second book of Fremantle, and I would recommend for people like me who enjoy this English Period. Her other book Queen's Gambit seems like the type of book I would highly enjoy too.

One thing I have to mention about the file itself is that it was not responsive to changes in format, size of font or even weight of font. Once again this might be related to the fact that it was an ARC, but it made reading at night on my Kobo difficult since the original font was very light and at times small, particularly when quoting from letters.



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