A brilliant re-telling of a life that other lives conveniently forgot.

Publisher: Arrow Books (Random House)
Pages: 404
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-09-949379-2
First Published: 2007
Date Reviewed: 16th September 2010
Rating: 4/5

Lady Jane Grey, the great-niece of Henry VIII, was executed on 12th February 1554. A puppet at the hands of her elders, she was abused by her parents and shown little care all her short life, being set up as queen against the rightful succession for the welfare of those very people who abused her. She “ruled” as queen for nine days having been forced to take the title by her power-driven father-in-law, before being arrested and made to suffer the pain of waiting while her second-cousin, the rightful queen, attempted to have her set free.

Weir has the story narrated by various people, those associated with Jane in some way, and of course Jane herself. Weir uses this device in order to give full details of what was happening so that you hear the story from different view points and can gather a lot of the evidence avaliable from different sources. Where Jane’s information is lacking Weir switches to her nurse, and where the nurse is stuck at home with her mistress Weir turns to the Dudleys.

There is a single point that I find cause for debate with, and it is not so much to do with the story as the author herself so I will deal with it first. Because much of Jane’s life was included in those of Katherine Parr and Elizabeth I’s, much of the narrative is very similar to that of Weir’s later book, The Lady Elizabeth (which I do not hesitate to admit that I read first), and also her non-fictional account of the heirs of Henry VIII, Children Of England. In literal terms this could not be helped and it is understandable that, being a lover of Tudor history, Weir would want to write about all three women, but the stories are too similar. So the question is, was it a good idea for Weir to produce three books that, in part, deal with the same subject? The case for the books is that the accounts are each told from different points of view, so in that way to read all three means you gain a very good understanding of events. The case against is that it reads a bit like a cut and paste job. Weir hasn’t reused the same phrases but the problem is that for the most part she may as well have because of the similarity.

It’s difficult to review objectively a book that deals with a very real and very terrible subject, so it’s just as well that Weir has produced a book that had me angry for good reason, and emotionally involved. As Weir reminds us, Mary was not disposed to kill Jane but when the Spanish ambassador said that her husband-to-be would not go to England unless she did, she relented. It’s horrifying to read, because even if the dialogue of the scene is fiction the basis is factual. It’s abhorrent to think that Mary put her husband-to-be before Jane’s life even if you can understand somewhat that she was afraid that to lose him would mean no marriage or children from her; because Mary didn’t want to lose the power to change the faith back from Protestant to Catholic. We all know that in truth Mary was an incredibly mislaid Catholic for believing Protestants needed burning, but the case of Jane versus Catholicism is just disgusting. Unfortunately it happened and there’s nothing we could have done about it. And all that for a man who was constantly unfaithful, uncaring, scheming, and evidently only Catholic in name.

And religion is something you definitely find yourself thinking about, towards the end of the book especially. The monologues regarding religion demonstrate the lack of thought both denominations had regarding the ways to God. Both sides consider themselves the true faith but did either really have a right to the claim? In essence very few truly practiced what they preached, and it wasn’t just a case of being lax in their Christian duties.

Something Weir causes you to do is re-assess Guilford Dudley. She tells you about the cruel ways in which he treated Jane, which may or may not be true but if not certainly would have mapped to other ways, and then shows his remorse. Guilford was unfortunately a product of his parents and it took the threat of death to change his actions towards Jane. In Guilford and Jane we see where a path has forked – Jane has dealt with her neglectful parents in a mature manner, whereas spoiled yet subtly neglected Guilford is a mess.

As she does later, in The Lady Elizabeth, Weir peppers the text with lots of factual bites, but you can tell in the way that it’s done, like dialogue, that Weir wants to impart as much factual knowledge as possible. This the book read more like a non-fiction so that, effectively, what you’ve got here is a factual book disguised.

Weir takes the chance, while the story is less harrowing, to inject some humour into the it to lighten the mood, but she never strays from fact which means that the laughs you will find are ones the people of the time would also have shared. For example, Henry VIII wanted to annul his marriage to Anne of Cleves post haste because he found she smelt bad and was overall unattractive to him – but he was very upset when she agreed without pause that that was a good idea. It’s also fun to read the description of Jane Seymour by Frances Brandon, whether factual or not, who describes her as “that pale witless milksop”. In addition to these snippets you get to hear what the servants thought of their masters, and of course as they were actually normal people (for can you really say the sheep-like nobles with their disloyal ways would make preferable companions?), it’s very interesting. The servants were the satirical reporters of the day.

Children are often head strong and inclined to speaks their minds, and perhaps none more so than the young kings of old. Although King Edward VI is part of the background cast, Weir provides through him a very good source of the nature of privileged children in those times, including all the thoughts a nine-year-old boy would have given his thirty-year-old sister regarding the redemption of her soul. Of course the young king wasn’t always obeyed, and in fact had a tendency to be stroppy.

I know people speak in hushed whispers of young brides dead within a year of their wedding, or of mothers of large families cruelly taken from them.

Speaking of children, Weir doesn’t shy from providing accounts of childbirth, indeed there are at least three included in the book of varying success. Childbirth was fraud with danger in Tudor times and it makes you think how far we’ve come, yet also reminds you that many places in the world still suffer, which is crazy really because medicine has come so far.

Weir’s style of writing is compelling without being difficult to put down for a while. In my opinion her best moment is in the final pages where she moves between the point of view of Jane and her executioner. But she makes a few errors that should have been picked up on, most noticeably saying that baby Mary Grey went to bed with Katherine while they were in Oxford – after saying Mary had been left at home. This isn’t a problem however, and it’s perhaps a reason to be thankful that she made the error there where historical fact wasn’t imperative to know.

In a bad time and a bad place there lived many awful and self-righteous people who would give their daughter’s happiness for their own promotion. Lady Jane Grey’s story is an all too often but very important one and Weir has produced a work worthy of the time you may want to dedicate to her.

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War affects everyone involved in different ways, and sometimes it doesn’t just stop with those around at the time.

Publisher: Harper Press (Harper Collins)
Pages: 329
Type: Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-00-728637-9
First Published: 2009
Date Reviewed: 21st July 2010
Rating: 3/5

A few years after WW2, Claire moves with her husband (a marriage of convenience) to Hong Kong, setting herself up as a piano teacher for a local family. She starts to become acquainted with the community yet always remains on the outside. At one of these parties she meets Will, an Englishman employed by her own employers, and the two begin an affair. But Will is constantly distant and there’s something amiss about the Chen family. As the story unravels we are introduced to another tale – Trudy Liang ten years earlier, a beautiful woman who once called Will her lover.

Before reading The Piano Teacher I’d gone for a good few months without historical fiction and the setting of this book and the summer-read aspects meant that I read it incredibly fast. But speed-reading isn’t so much a positive thing with this book – you find yourself reading it quickly because there’s nothing to peak your interest. It isn’t until much later on that it begins to show promise. A big factor in this is that it is mostly era-driven. It’s the war that is paramount here. Lee has written her book akin to the way Victoria Hislop did a year earlier in The Return, it’s very much a case that the characters serve a purpose as vehicles – they are simply there to aid the explanation of the wretchedness of the war. However, unlike Hislop, who used a number of characters to explain different situations, Lee has focused on specific features, she mentions the bombing but focuses on the predicament of the civilians, for the most part the foreigners (Americans, Britons, Europeans) who were stuck in Hong Kong when the Japanese took over. The information is fascinating and horrid in it’s own right but as the focus is on the war you can’t help but feel disconnected from the characters for whom there are parties and a little love but not much else to recommend them to your memory.

Then it all changes. From era-driven the narrative nose-dives straight into the characters, suddenly they are everything and the war is still important but more the cause, it’s no longer in the spotlight. Where Claire was the only character available for comment there is now a crowd of willing participants.

By themselves the characters are fabulous. Claire begins a possible racist and ends as perhaps the most open-minded of the lot. It takes a while to warm to her and even then sometimes you want to change your opinion, but you can’t because you know that she knows of her flaws and that she’s struggling to work through them. Will’s aura is enticing and his distance and pain understandable, but maybe he could have handled things differently. The Chens remain unlikeable and plummet further as the story goes on, and Trudy, though but a memory, is an enigma.

Because the different aspects are so disjointed it’s easy enough to close the book at the end. You feel sad for what’s happened but because you weren’t acquainted with the characters for long enough it’s difficult to feel their plight beyond the general understanding that what happened was awful. Part of this can be explained by taking into account the book’s title – it doesn’t really say what the book is about as Claire (the piano teacher) is very much apart from the rest of the story even when she meets those involved. She develops into a strong character and the end suggests she would be an interesting person to read about further – only of course you can’t because the book has ended. Claire made a few people talk about the issues, but nothing she did caused anything that wouldn’t have happened anyway because although she gains information she never uses it. This book could have easily been called something in reference to Will, Trudy, her cousin, the Chens, or the war. It is so unspecific that yes, I do believe it impacts upon your enjoyment because you open the book having ideas of a completely erroneous nature.

Lee provides ample time to the different nationalities. She writes about a country ruled by foreigners but never slanders anyone, and when it comes to the invasion she simply details, never condemns. Her characters get on with everyone. There is still racism about but in most cases the characters have already rejected it.

Lee’s writing is lovely, not incredible, but noticeable. She prefers some words at strange times however, for example, “brackish”: “The sea was green and brackish” – the word is like a crack in an otherwise perfectly smooth pavement, it doesn’t fit in with the rest of her writing. The chapters move between tenses and while Claire’s flow well it seems that when it came to Trudy, Lee wasn’t sure how she wanted to write it. There are a couple of times when both styles are used in the same chapter and you find yourself reading the same sentences over to try to work out exactly what you’re reading.

I think that if you’re looking for a breezy summer read with a bit of substance you’ll be satisfied but in my personal opinion The Piano Teacher does not fill the criteria for a good political historical novel.

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Twelve years ago a young girl called Charlie bought a book, captivated by the beautiful cover of a gun on a green background and a woman’s silhouette drifting away into the green night. She thought it would make a good candidate for her first “grown-up” book – but then she found out that this was the third in a series so she bought the first two (The Ruby In The Smoke and The Shadow In The North), loving the first but finding the second boring. She never finished the second and so the awesome green book with the gun on it was never read.

Publisher: Point (Scholastic)
Pages: 390
Type: Fiction
Age: YA/Adult
ISBN: 978-1407-11171-1 (a newer version than the one shown)
First Published: 1991
Date Reviewed: 30th June 2010
Rating: 4.5/5

Throughout my older years The Tiger In The Well continued to beckon me from a dusty old shelf and, finally, last year, I decided the time was right – I must re-read the first and finish the second and then read this third book. I liked the first but it wasn’t as compelling as I remembered, however the second was dull, so dull, and I could see why I’d given up on it. And now I’ve read the third and it seems my young intuition was correct – this time Pullman has presented a cracker of a story.

Someone’s after Sally’s money and the daughter fathered by her dead lover, Frederick Garland, claiming that she was married to him (the man after her money) and saying he’d like a divorce due to her scandalous behaviour. Everything seems legit, and it’s starting to eat away at Sally so much that she’s beginning to believe it. At the same time hundreds of Jewish immigrants are being persecuted, and it’s the same faction that are pursuing in both incidences. Sally’s friends Jim and Webster are out of the country but fortunately, due to the plight of the Jews, there are plenty of people who want the faction brought down and unlike her poor excuse for a solicitor these people won’t let them get away with it.

The Tiger In The Well brings the Sally Lockhart Quartet into a new light. Sally is in her mid twenties now and because of this Pullman is able to take the storytelling up a notch, assuming the readers will have grown up too and therefore are old enough to digest the issues he presents without worry. There’s a mass of subplots and extra details in the book, making it a speedy read – there are situations where characters split up and so the narrative has to dart back and forth continuously, but Pullman goes into enough detail before this happens so that you want to hear about each group equally as much and forgetting is impossible. With never a dull moment whatsoever, the long book takes you through chases, hiding places, work in the slums, the high society, the gangs, the big homes, the shabby shelters, the battles, the peace, the sadness, the happiness – it’s all here.

The Victorian setting was good in the last books but Pullman never made the most of it; that’s been rectified here, he describes locations beautifully and makes the past come alive, one can envelope themselves in the plot and although it’s a story centred around hate it’s hard not to wish you were there when Queen Victoria reigned. Orchard House brings pastel greens and white to mind, the streets grey and brown, and the mansion red and gold. Victorian England was a mutely-toned place, but Pullman has pulled out its treasures and put them on display.

Pullman is at his best when writing about women, and he’s on top form here. He likes his women to have guts and be strong of mind but doesn’t load them with the stereotypical sex image you would usually expect. Sally Lockhart is only ever burdened as a woman by the sexist views of her society, away from that she is as good as any man and only ever behaves as men would expect her to when completely overpowered.

Unfortunately the climax is a let-down. After all the preparation Sally has done, when she finally gets to the deepest darkest part, the nucleus of all her problems, the plot is resolved by something outside of anyone’s control. You’re on course, reading swiftly, and then this “thing” happens and suddenly there’s no reason to continue because it’s over and you know you’re never going to get to read about what Pullman had primed you for. The particular setting of this part, a fantastically described house which you can let your imagination go riot on, is magnificent and set the stage perfectly, so why Pullman went for an easy and boring cliché is incomprehensible.

Luckily there is a bit more action to be had after this episode and it’s very funny, so although it doesn’t quite match up it’s worth carrying on. Harriet, Sally’s daughter, goes from posh rich girl to happy average child and the dialogue Pullman gives her is hilarious. Throughout the book Pullman makes a point of giving Harriet a good amount of time and tells us what she’s thinking. And when Sally tells her to be brave, the little two year old remembers it and comes into her own. A toddler being a compelling character all by herself – that’s something you don’t come across every day.

If you are upset by the fact that Jim and Webster are in South America while this is going on never fear. Pullman will more than make up for it by the time you’ve reached the end.

I believe that with a quick bit of research you could read this book without having read the others first, and personally that’s what I would recommend doing. The Tiger In The Well rips it’s claws through the previous books and roars it’s way through from start to finish. It is an excellent book, possibly even surpassing Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

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In the new world, known in 1800’s China as the Gold Mountain, fortunes were made by those whose lives were otherwise destined to be laborious. One of those lives was Fong See’s and he changed the make-up and the fortunes of his family forever.

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 376
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-7475-9907-4
First Published: 1995
Date Reviewed: 10th May 2010
Rating: 5/5

Lisa See, author of the later best-selling Snow Flower And The Secret Fan, details the business ventures and lives of her paternal family from the very first venture to America of her great-great-grandfather to the present day.

In 1867, Fong Dun Shung left his family in China to seek his fortunes in America. He soon brought his fourth son, Fong See, over to help him but ended up living out his later years in his home village. Fong See, on the other hand, lived to prosper in the United States, setting up an underwear company and marrying an American woman. The business changed to become an antique supplier. Fong See’s children learned perhaps more than he the injustice in the world, yet managed to be successful in their own right. As a memoir the book focuses on one subject in particular – business success in America – with information (a great amount, actually) about other aspects of family life. Amidst this is the story of the persecution of Chinese Americans and the many laws to dissuade them from doing practically anything other than stay at home.

On Gold Mountain reads like a work of fiction. The story is fascinating by itself but Lisa See (the author, whom I will refer to by first name from now on to avoid any confusion) has made it even better. A few of the dialogues are completely made up, as the amount of detail she goes into just isn’t possible to gather through sources, but instead of detracting from its success as you may think, this adds to the engrossing quality of the book. Lisa hasn’t just doled out dates and factual information about a story that, let’s face it, isn’t going to affect anyone but her own relatives, she’s made it compelling for the casual reader too. She’s used her skills as a writer and plenty of artistic license to create a work that her great-aunt Sissee, the person who proposed the idea of a memoir, would surely approve of.

Talking of Sissee, let’s get straight down to another note I made while reading this book – I, a reader in Britain with only outsider knowledge of Chinese culture, feel as though I’m part of the family. The book isn’t written in a way that entices the reader like this, and of course because the characters are real people they never address the audience, you’re just a fly-on-the-wall – but after all the information I’ve been given and after all the emotions I’ve been made to feel for these people I know I could sit down to lunch with them as boldly as if I’d been invited as kin. I was excited by Fong See and Ticie’s family and very upset as each passed away; even if I knew it was going to happen, I hoped that it wouldn’t. The family is accessible. The rogues of the story are likeable, even as they cause family disputes. No one is condemned, though there are good reasons why they could and perhaps should be. Everyone is described in detail enough that their unique personalities are shown – in the case of the siblings you have Ming and Ray – playboys and business-orientated, Bennie who is loyal, Eddy who wants to do his own thing, and Sissee who just wants freedom. It makes you think, should I be writing my own family’s history before it’s forgotten? No family history is plain and boring, and Lisa, with her incredible yet mostly family-centric story (no one changed the world, for example) proves that you don’t have to be of royal blood to have a good tale to tell.

Lisa makes her great-grandfather, Fong See, incredibly readable. Whether or not some of the events are fabricated to some extent the reader can really move into step with him and become absorbed in the story. For my part I must say that I’ve never felt such a pull from a book before, I was living as an invisible follower of Fong See and, his roguish elements included, I can see why Ticie, Lisa’s great-grandmother, was so drawn to him.

The characters focused on most are Fong See, Ticie, and their children. This creates two points of thought in my mind. The first is that depending on the individual preference of the reader for country or city living, either the first or second half of the book will be more intriguing. As America, at the time, was just forming, there are plenty of descriptions of farmland to whet the appetite of a person who prefers peace, but then as the cities expand there is little greenery and many factories so the detail is in the creation of material goods. Fong See and his first family’s story (he got around a bit) straddle both, but while Fong See and Ticie are together the emphasis is more towards the country. The second thought is that after Fong See and Ticie part ways the story is less engrossing, this can’t be helped of course, as it’s fact, but the interest garnered from the reader because of the story of a mixed-race family in troubled times, the adaptation to another’s culture, and the building up of a business, is lessened immediately following it. There is more to be had in the stories of the children for their number but as American laws are relaxed and life becomes more like our own today the narrative appears to slow down – however it’s not so much the story as the reader’s desire to continue reading. The problem is that the “action” comes in those first years and then of course there is no climax because the story can never end completely because this is the tale of a family still going today.

Lisa writes her account of Fong See crossing to America and then and only then gives all the other reported accounts that she has discovered. She ends the section brilliantly with a little wit, saying that we should probably trust the age and journey times Fong See gave to newspapers and customers. She wants the version she provided first – detailed and probably, by her own admissions of the information, dreamt up by relatives – to be true, but will give us the other accounts anyway. That she uses wit may seem self-absorbing, but the way she words it makes it akin to the usual basic mysteries every family has – as more generations are born and previous ones disappear, information gets blurry.

In relation to this, the wit in the book, I would like to put forward a quote:

Fortunately, the Pruetts were Pennsylvania Dutch and not given to concerns over worldly possessions.

While the initial opinion may be that Lisa is on a moral high ground flaunting her superior ancestry, isn’t it that she’s injecting humour into a relatively arduous subject? Both possibilities are equally possible, but there’s no doubt it’s the latter, the humour.

Irony – the information Lisa provides on reclaimed land. The Chinese reclaimed land from marshes and bogs when no one else would because it was dirty and infested but they were not granted any of that new land because of the Alien Land Act. Aliens? Surely everyone who wasn’t Native American was alien – but the Caucasians didn’t think of that because they thought they were superior. The people who put the act in motion, the invaders, likely British-born or if not at least European, were not natives of the land themselves. It’s disgusting when you think about it. Looking back on one’s country’s ancestors is always a cause for distress at some point, no matter where you’re from, but to read a true account of how your people were so self-righteous is most difficult. In this reader’s humble opinion, yes the Chinese may have been cruel themselves at the time with their foot-binding and treating women as slaves, but it was the Caucasians who were the true aliens, for their actions towards other races rendered them inhuman.

Although the Chinese saw America as a gold mine there was nothing gold about the few dollars the first workers brought home. In retelling the See family story Lisa describes the creation of the original railroads – the meagre pay, the poor living conditions, the perils of the parties using dynamite to blow holes in the hills – and the many shop keepers who struggled to earn their keep. The lucky ones, who had the ideas and ambition to start their own businesses, like Fong See, were those who caused the phrase “gold mountain” to stay in use, but they were few and far between; and, to determine another aspect of this school of thought: as Fong See remarks, one could be a rich man in China from the money they made in America, but in the west they were still poor. What the Chinese didn’t realise was the extent of the difference between quality of life and cost of living. To be truly rich, one had to return to China, making their time in America simply a long sabbatical.

In her fiction work, Lisa uses words brilliantly. Because of the nature of this book there are few incidences for poetic language but they do exist, and they exist in the form of those thoughts Lisa’s family members have. Perhaps this was part of the reason Lisa created those thoughts, to give her a chance to write with more flare and more of the style she employs in her novels.

In early April of 1877, Luscinda Pruett lay dying. Her mind wandered over her life in Oregon, her children, her husband, and God, whom she knew she’d be meeting soon. She’d had a fever for weeks, and now the pneumonia had grabbed hold of her body and wouldn’t let go. Not that it wasn’t peaceful lying here, as Mrs. Peterson sponged her forehead with cool cloths and the Reverend Peterson gave a discourse on the second commission of Christ to his Apostles. Or was he reading from the tenth chapter of First Corinthians? Maybe that wasn’t it at all. She knew she’d heard him give those sermons before, at their Sunday meetings. No matter.

The above is quite possibly exactly what Luscinda Pruett was thinking, safe as her thoughts were from the limitations of a strict outside world. But more to the point Lisa has provided her great-great-grandmother, who has a minor role to play in her story, with a grand final performance.

Lisa’s descriptions are magnificent, again in this you can see the novelist in her trying to climb out of the closet into which she’s stowed it away and blending its fiction skills with fact:

For Choey Lon, China City was a magical place where the fragrant smell of incense wafted from a temple and gentle breezes passed through wind chimes hanging before shops.

In writing On Gold Mountain Lisa fulfilled her objective, to honour her aunt Sissee’s request that their family story be told, and brought into being a commercially available account of a minority living amongst a majority, to a world where it’s likely not many of these events have been written about in such a way and with such filial passion. The stress may be on her family but there is enough material to take away and add to any knowledge you might have had of the period previously.

On Gold Mountain is a lovingly rendered story of adventure, love, and above all triumph. And I’m afraid you just have to love an author who uses the word “shenanigans”.

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I will say now that I believe Richard III to have instigated the murders of Edward V and his brother. But regardless I was after more debate and another’s decision on the subject, someone with more information than me.

Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 258
Type: Non-Fiction
Age: Adult
ISBN: 978-0-099-52696-4
First Published: 1992
Date Reviewed: 25th May 2010
Rating: 2.5/5

What happened to Edward V and his brother the Duke of York has been the subject of speculation for centuries and their purported death in the late 1400’s material for many debates. Richard III, their uncle, wanted the throne – but did he kill them? He had usurped the crown from Edward already – all he had to do was keep the children locked up. Then was it Henry VII who took the crown from Richard, wanting to make sure the old line wouldn’t try to overturn the ruling? Or were the Princes left in the Tower indefinitely and died of natural causes?

I looked to Weir’s book on the subject because I’d read two of her non-fiction works before, The Six Wives Of Henry VIII and Children Of England and even though she has gained from me the nickname “The Hitherto Woman” for her excessive use of the word, I regard her publications as a staple part of my Tudor studies.

In the foreword Weir announces that she will look at the evidence for and against objectively – I relished these words because a debate was just what I was after, but alas it was not to be. At first glance the book shows promise, Weir has grand designs and will do her best to give all the accounts and evidence. She provides a thorough grounding in the background of the family and plenty of information on how Richard could have come to be so cruel. She is definitely right to have assumptions here, Richard’s childhood was full of violence and hatred and as has often been the case throughout history, a background such as this promotes the perversion of an otherwise innocent mind.

The characters are given a lot of space. We hear plenty on Richard, as discussed, Elizabeth Wydville, the heirs of Elizabeth’s union with Edward IV, most of the related gentry, and those first involved with Henry VII. There is detail enough to know quite well the personalities of each. Weir documents the period from Edward IV’s reign (including his own battles for the crown) to the time the rumours died down during the Tudor dynasty, adding information about the discovery of the bodies and the latest forensic work done in modern times – which was in 1930; since then the permission to study the bones has been denied.

But the historian’s winning streak doesn’t continue. Weir, from the first few pages, indicates that she believes Richard guilty, and the reader would be forgiven for listening to her at the time when she says that she will be objective. But from the moment she launches into the heart of the story, until the end, it’s obvious that she has let bias take over. Her voice is centred on her belief that Richard was guilty and although she looks at the opposing evidence she rarely gives it much thought. To her it’s plain and simple – the opposing evidence is worthless – and all this happens while she’s picking and choosing which rumours suit her story, opting at times to suggest that rumours believed by few are reliable and dismissing ones that many more people listened to.

Weir uses Thomas More’s account more often than any other. This she gives reason for – Thomas More was known to have good connections, eye-witnesses, and was able to be truthful (I haven’t said “was truthful” as in some instances his is the only account of an event so we can only take his word for it) because by the time he was writing people didn’t have to fear revenge for what they said. Note my words, “in the time he was writing”. Yes, More may have had his contacts, but he himself was not around at the time.

Another worrying problem is Weir’s total reliance on More. It’s a case of what More says goes. Weir assumes without a doubt that More would have acquired some of his information from his friend, who lived in a nunnery that was opposite the Tower of London. She says that because the nunnery was so close the occupants would have known what was going on. This assumption is, I’m afraid, cause for mirth, because we cannot say for definite that the nuns would have known anything. Do we today know everything about our neighbours’ lives, every one of us? Not often. The final point I will make regarding More is that Weir says he is true because he was writing for himself with no plans to publish his work. He could well have written in this way, but with Henry VIII, a man of irregular mood, on the throne, and More in such a high position at court, would he have been so careless? A sovereign could dispose of a person at the drop of a hat, at the drop of a sword; More’s privacy wouldn’t have been guaranteed. Of course if the account is true there would be no reason for him to lie because as it is there was no content that the Tudors could harass him over but, and amazingly this is a point Weir makes that contradicts her afore mentioned love – his sources may have been lying.

So while More’s account could be deemed reliable it’s the way in which Weir approaches him with starry eyes that’s cause for contention.

Weir often contradicts herself via quotations. As an example she says on one page that Henry VII and his wife were sharing a bed before marriage because their baby arrived eight months after and seemingly at full term, but then on the very next page, the opposite page no less, she quotes Francis Bacon as saying that the baby was born in the eighth month but was strong and able. This quotation suggests that the baby was premature.

Lastly I will examine the writing style. There are too many instances of jumping back and forth along the chronological scale. Weir will start with one date then go back a few years for a number of paragraphs by the end of which you’ve completely forgotten that this was just a short detour from the main path. As well as this she sometimes neglects to point out exactly which person she’s referring to, for example when one paragraph discusses the actions of two Elizabeths. Would it be Elizabeth Wydville who we begun the paragraph with or Elizabeth of York who we moved on to afterwards – the ending sentence would suggest the latter but it really could be the first.

It is quite apt that this book has gathered reviews erring equally on both sides of the coin. It’s fuelled more debate as well as possibly (if Weir read them) making Weir re-assess her ideas once more. But that is all. The blatant rejection of any opposition is very unprofessional, and I say that as someone who agrees with Weir’s conclusion. As a tertiary source the book is useful for essays and the like, and even otherwise it’s interesting as another person’s research, but it should on no account be taken as the definitive conclusion and should form merely a small part of a study into the Princes. This book is biased and badly written and I would advise readers to seek out another historian’s work, if not instead of this then at least as well as.

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