Customer Reviews

Queen of Subtleties

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Only one's fascination with the Tudor lifestyle and legacy will keep you crawling thru this book to the end. Since we all know Bolelyn's dramatic and tragic story, if it needs to be RETOLD, it must be done in an innovative way, when being recounted for the thousandth time. What it did NOT need, was to be filtered thru an "US Magazine" thesaurus!...Language like "partied", "awesome", and "bump" (for pregnancy), are actually used in their modern context! This is Tudor history... for Paris Hilton!

A very confused telling of a familiar story, jarring modern slang, and distortion of historical facts. I have rarely been more disappointed in a book. I though I'd list it on Amazon and get rid of it (and get a portion of my purchase price back), but the depreciation on the price of the book is worse than a new car! Don't waste your time on this. I agree with some of the other critics - how the heck does a piece of junk like this get published?

Anne Boleyn was one of the most interesting women in history, almost as interesting as her daughter, Elizabeth. Over the years I have read every book I have found on both of them. I have always had much sympathy for Anne since I felt she was caught up in a situation of which she lost control. She was a pawn in the hands of her father and uncle and in the end, she paid the ultimate price. However, if this book had been the first one I'd ever read about her, I would not read a second. In this portrayal she is mean, petty, a totally unlikable woman. And the device the author uses as to names--- Franky? Billy? Nick? I'm surprised that Dunn didn't have Anne calling Henry V111 just plain Hank. Other references were " Her stubborness" and "Her Oldbagness", meaning Queen Catherine. Totally distracting, and unnecessary. The story, had it been told in a more straightforward manner without all the silly names and more traditional language, would have been more true to the time, and I think Dunn went out of her way to make Anne a total villianess. I liked the side story of Lucy Cornwallis, but overall the book could have been so much better. Anne Boyelyn's life ended with a sword. Now she is getting a hatchet job.

If you love history and historical fiction, if you've been fascinated by Anne Bolyn or Henry VIII, if you love big, juicy period tales----please avoid this book at all costs! I, like many of the reviewers here,have long gobbled up everything I could about Anne, and even played her in Maxwell Anderson's wonderful drama, "Anne of the Thousand Days," and this was a bloody awful attempt at a retelling of her story. I felt nothing for any of the characters---(how on earth can Henry and Anne be boring for heaven's sake!), got confused by the muddying of the sequence of events, and loathed her unaccountable use of modern slang which ruined any hope of getting a real sense of the era---she actually referred to Thomas Bolyn as "dad" in the book! I only finished it--scimmed it--out of a horrified disbelief that anything so unredeemingly bad could get published.

I am absolutely mystified as to how something as poorly written and researched as this could ever be considered by an agent and/or publisher. I borrowed the book and, as another reviewer mentioned, could not finish it, although I skimmed the last chapters. My motivation was more curiosity than actual interest.

First, the language is absurd, both in regards to dialogue and narrative. The modern idioms are jarring, and the obscenties are both inappropriate to the character, and anachronistic. At times Anne Boleyn is shrewish and flat, at others, maudlin and melodramatic. The "f-word" was definitely in use by Anglo-Saxon times, but simply meant sowing fields with seed; the notion of Anne Boleyn dropping the modern idiom "f-bomb" is simply absurd. I suspect her often employed insults were edgy, even brutal, but not cellar rat obscene. To reduce her wit to something akin to the scatological rumblings of a teenage boy is the mark of a hack writer.

As a historian specializing in this period (medieval and early Renaissance England), I have never encountered a good piece of fiction concerning this tragic and complex queen. None have captured a period feel (in language, setting, attitudes or thought processes), nor been historically accurate.

I simply do not understand why facts must be distorted, embellished, ignored, or created, as Anne Boleyn lived an extraordinary life in an extraordinary time. This is just another tedious exercise in distorted reality, similar to that execrable "The Other Boleyn Girl".

To think I actually was looking forward to this book! It really is rather horrible. The language is too modern and just makes Anne Boleyn sound like some kind of mallrat...it's a shame that such an interesting historical character is treated in such a shabby manner.

If you really want a good read about Anne Boleyn, try Phillipa Gregory's "The Other Boleyn Girl," a historically accurate and interesting account that rings true.

I was thrilled to find that there would be a new novel about Anne Boleyn, and, I was a tad disappointed. Reading the sections for Anne Boleyn was a tedious chore, and I had to drag myself through the,. The Lucy Cornwallis parts were okay, but they were also a little slow. As most novels, they portray Anne as a shrill woman who bashed around 'poor' Henry. What annoyed me was the unnecessary use of cussing going on...it was as if I was reading a note written by an 9th grader! What was also annoying were the historical inaccuracies, but if you might notice at the end of the book there are explanations, which cooled me down.

Definitely one to miss.

I could not even go past page 100 - I never quit a book. But, the vernacular described by other reviews is accurate - stupid, out of place and never allows you to feel part of the time. I am fascinated by Anne Boleyn and the other wives but I had to put this book down as a waste of time. The newspaper will probably prove more interesting.

I had supposed when I opened this book that the title "Queen of Subtleties" would be applied to the two narrators in different senses: to Lucy Cornwallis as the pastry chef and Anne Boleyn as a plotter. There is no subtlety whatsoever to the portrayal of Anne. There is none in the interweaving of the two narrations, either. They don't necessarily match in time or theme, so I suppose that Dunn simply chopped up the two stories based on page numbers or to avoid writing seques.

The Lucy Cornwallis sections could have been completed into a very interesting historical novel. Since Lucy, like most of the common people of the time, sided with Catherine of Aragon, this could have made a very interesting counterpoint to Anne Boleyn's tale. One of the things that is most fascinating about it is the look at behind-the-scenes at the palace, not the world of the courtiers, but of the common people who did the real work of running the place. Particularly interesting is the informal look at the relationship between them and Henry. I feel somewhat cheated to after all I have read about the Tudors, I didn't know that Henry played cards with his cellerer (and lost!) until I read this. Readers with an interest might want to read Joan Glasheen's The Secret People of the Palaces: The Royal Household from the Plantagenets to Queen Victoria, which is rather dry (a lot of it is simply lists of offices) but contains a number of interesting anecdotes as well. All the King's Cooks: The Tudor Kitchens of King Henry VIII at Hampton Court Palace by Peter Brears should obviously be right on point.

Unfortunately, this promising piece is never completely developed and is paired with a flat, simplistic account of Anne Boleyn. This is supposed to be written on the eve of her death, intended for her daughter Elizabeth, but I regard it as a complete failure. It simply doesn't ring true as an account of someone looking backwards, worrying about how their child will think of them, knowing that they are to die the next day. Only at some of the points when Anne is actually thinking about her daughter is there any nuance to her character, reflection, or any sense of leave-taking. Otherwise, she is always shrill, literally and figuratively, crude in all senses of the word and utterly without character development. Anne, as seen by Dunn, apparently had no inner life and insight into herself and other people, which I think is the point of a novel. Otherwise, one can simply read an encyclopedia article. There is no point recounting this oft-told tale unless the author has something more to offer than this flat, simplistic account. Or if this is how she wants to present Anne Boleyn, maybe she should have told the story from the point of view of Mary Tudor, Henry and Catharine's daughter. For better Anne Boleyn novels, I'd read The Concubine by Norah Lofts or Brief gaudy hour,: A novel of Anne Boleyn by Margaret Campbell Barnes. At this point, I believe Eric Ives' The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn is considered the best biography; I also like Marie Lousie Bruce's Anne Boleyn..

The language of this section is deliberately (according to the notes) modern and jarring. apparently in intentional contrast to the Lucy Cornwallis section. I am not normally a stickler for historic accuracy in language, absolutely accurate language would difficult to read, but this is painful. I can only suppose that Dunn means the contrast to signify that England would have been a better, gentler place without Anne Boleyn. I can't imagine what else she thinks it accomplishes.

Only for the VERY dedicated historical novel reader.

While I love the topic, The Queen of Subtleties just lacked... well, subtlety. Dunn had a wealth of material to work with and yet she managed to make this book seem unrelated to the real historical figures. It lacked depth in Anne Boleyn's entries - and while Lucy Cornwallis' chapters were quite interesting and seemed more sincere this came from a character who, except for her existence, is entirely fictional. One would have wished that she brought the same sense of realism to Anne and made her more human, more believable, but instead she was portrayed more 2-dimensionally.

The book was readable, but the lack of continuity (the great leaps back and forth in time periods) was frustrating. The modern language was jarring. I saw Dunn's point in trying to let us more easily understand the language by putting it in modern terms, but much was lost in the modernization. You lost the feel of the era.

As a book unrelated to Anne Boleyn, this book wasn't half bad. In context, it was disappointing.