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You know what, Philippa Gregory should change gears completely. Write about feudal Japan or WWII Poland or something. I guess this book could be considered a change for her--it's Cromwell England, not Elizabethan England, and it's a male protagonist--but it was not particularly a good shift. I think she needs to go do something else entirely for a while. Maybe she should take up carpentry or get a retail job. And then write about that instead of English history.
Okay, so this book. The main character, John, spends most of the book being torn between two lives: his old life in England, with the wife his father chose for him, and building a new life in Virginia, with a Powhatan girl he's fallen in love with. The resolution of these conflicts is kind of anticlimactic, especially since it happens maybe halfway through the book, at which point Gregory decides to stop writing a novel and start writing a history of the Cromwell wars and reign from the point of view of these fictional people who happened to live a few miles from London by boat. Seriously, events that affect the main characters almost stop after John's second trip to Virginia, and we just see these people wondering what Cromwell is going to do next. The narration is really uneven. Also, the ending is really stupid.
I was really into this book while I was reading it, but now I am annoyed that I spent the past three days on it. I really liked some of Gregory's other books, but I can't recommend this one.
Okay, so this book. The main character, John, spends most of the book being torn between two lives: his old life in England, with the wife his father chose for him, and building a new life in Virginia, with a Powhatan girl he's fallen in love with. The resolution of these conflicts is kind of anticlimactic, especially since it happens maybe halfway through the book, at which point Gregory decides to stop writing a novel and start writing a history of the Cromwell wars and reign from the point of view of these fictional people who happened to live a few miles from London by boat. Seriously, events that affect the main characters almost stop after John's second trip to Virginia, and we just see these people wondering what Cromwell is going to do next. The narration is really uneven. Also, the ending is really stupid.
I was really into this book while I was reading it, but now I am annoyed that I spent the past three days on it. I really liked some of Gregory's other books, but I can't recommend this one.
