Customer Reviews

The Queen's Sorrow: A Novel

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I first encountered Suzannah Dunn's writing through the quirky but intriguing story of Henry VIII's sixth wife, Catherine Parr and her bosom friend, Catherine Brandon, the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, The Sixth Wife: A Novel. This is the second time I've sampled another of her novels hoping to find it the same combination of suspenseful plot and adequate writing - a good beach or airplane read, essentially. (I bought this at Heathrow on the way home for the plane ride, in fact.) This will be the last time, however.

The Queen's Sorrow has little to do with Mary Tudor and the unquestioned fact that her reign - after an initial period of euphoria - was a litany of disaster, from failed crops to religious dissension and the losses of England's final possessions on the continent. Instead, the story revolves around the improbable adventures of an unconvincing character, a Spaniard who has left behind his wife and son in order to craft a sundial for the English queen as a gift from her new husband, the Spanish Prince Phillip. I say "adventures", but that is far too strong a word for Rafael's experiences in England. He travels to and from the court, worries about whether he'll be able to complete his sundial (whether he'll be paid for the supplies, for instance), and, in his spare time, broods and wonders about the mysterious housekeeper who serves the family that reluctantly offers him bed and board. Ultimately, the mystery of Cecily and her young son become entangled in Rafael's acute homesickness for his own family and the Queen's yearning for a son of her own to inherit the kingdom and preserve it as a Catholic realm.

Alas and alack. The elements are all there for a good novel - despite the fact that the title is misleading. But none of the characters is convincing and the plot plods, ambles and meanders. By the time what should be a shocking denouement is reached, what is horrifying isn't the outcome, but the fact that the reader doesn't care that much because Dunn has failed to persuade them that these are "living" characters. (This time, the contemporary approach to dialogue, while still distracting and irritating, was the least of this reader's problems with the novel.)

I didn't have quite as visceral a degree of repulsion for The Queen of Subtleties: A Novel of Anne Boleyn, although I wouldn't recommend it to a friend and would award it only 2.5 stars, versus 3.5 for the far better (albeit implausible at times) Sixth Wife. Avoid this; if you're looking for historical fiction about Mary Tudor, turn to Hilda Lewis's excellent books (out of print but available)Mary the Queen, I Am Mary Tudor. Philippa Gregory tackles Mary's woes and the woes of England under her rule through the eyes of a member of her entourage (a similar approach and one I think works better) in The Queen's Fool: A Novel (Boleyn). Any of those books I would award 3.5 to 4 stars.

"A Love Denied For Which a Country Must Suffer". That's on the front. In reading the back cover, one could get the impression that it was Mary Tudor's story, and Rafael was a close friend, or lover. Nothing could be furthur from the way the book plays out. Rafael comes to England with Phillip of Spain, to work on a sundial. He expects to only be there 6 weeks, but ends up staying over a year, because Phillip is kept in England. There is almost no dialogue; it is mostly Rafael's impressions of England and the English people. The book is slow moving and very over-written. Pages go on and on, with no movement forward in the story. Rafael and Queen Mary meet a few times, briefly, and they are like ships in the night-- no friendship develops other than their interest in children. The "great love" in the story is Rafael's love for his 4 year old son back in Spain. He has a fling with Cecily, the housekeeper where he is staying, and in the end betrays her, unknowingly. I would have enjoyed the book more if I had not felt mislead-- if it had been called "Rafael Goes To London", I would not have kept expecting something to happen between him and Mary. But it was so dull and drawn out that by the end I just wanted to get it finished.

Other reviewers have said it first and better, this is not a novel about Mary Tudor and the book cover and description are absolutely misleading.
Every person in the novel is sad, unendingly sad and it goes from bad to worse.
Perhaps the author was having a bad time in her life but why inflict it upon us. I am sad I read it. Bummer.

This was one of the worst books I ever read. There are 4/5 pages where the queen is even present and the ending is a mockery of any person's intelligence. No person with an iota of common sense would have done what Rafael does. The whole book is about Rafael's thoughts, which are in themselves quite boring. The characters are extremely simple and not in the least bit interesting. I skipped a lot of pages, but really regret buying this book at all. Wish I could get my money back!!

I thought I was buying something literary based on the cover, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. Henceforth, I will always buy something after reading the reviews!!

Paints a picture of Tudor life. Quite descriptive of the times and the effects on the people from Mary's attacks on heretics. Unfortunately there is little of Mary herself in this book. I was disappointed. There are interactions with her through out the book but not what I expected or really wanted to read. If you wish to read about the lives of the people during her reign you will be satisfied. If you wish to read about Mary herself you will be disappointed.

A book titled "The Queen's Sorrow" should be about the queen. I was excited for a book about her marriage to phillip of spain and I thought that it being from someone else's viewpoint would help to freshen up the story.

But what the author delivered was nowhere near what I expected. We get pages upon pages of dreamy sequences from a spanish man who comes over with Phillip's court. He is supposed to be building the queen a sundial but his funding never comes through. So we are treated to pages of him lamenting about his life while he waits around to see if his project will ever go through.

I kept reading to see if it would get better, hoping as he learned more of the english language he would start interacting with members of the court. But that did not happen. Instead, he sat around and spied on the housekeeper where he was staying. This book was very bland, and not worth the buy.

In spite of the picture of the queen on the book's cover, and the title, this book is not about Mary Tudor at all. Its the story of Rafael, a member of Philip of Spain's entourage. It takes place, of course, during the reign of Mary Tudor. But if you want to read about Mary Tudor, find another book. It is well written, however.

This book is one of the worst I have EVER read. The title is misleading as the Queen only appears 3 times. The main character (the Spainard) you don't care about and the ending - well I felt sick after reading this. Save your money and buy something by Alison Weir or Phillipa Gregory instead.

Despite the blurb on the back, this book is 98% about some Spanish guy named Rafael who has been commissioned to make a sun dial as a wedding gift for Mary Tudor & Prince Philip of Spain. He's pretty dull as a narrator and the actual in-person meetings with the queen total 5. Most of his tale is an endless ramble between his unhappy marriage back in Spain and his growing fascination with an English woman who works in his housing. The mild interest I had in this book waned rapidly with the constant look-backs at his life. The ending just sort of meandered off and you don't really know what happened. I went on turning pages trying to find out what happened in the end, re-read the last five pages and still ended up speculating about what really happened. I cannot recommend this book, even for folks who are totally enthralled with the Tudor era.

Everybody here who gave the book two stars just because the cover is misleading deserves to have their reviewing privileges taken away. So it wasn't what they were expecting - I get it, that sucks. But that doesn't mean it's a bad book. And quite frankly, people who read a lot of Tudor-era novels should be used to misleading titles and covers manipulated to attract more readers. There's a reason 95% of Tudor novels are titled "The Queen's _" or "The King's _" and feature a beautiful woman in an ornate gown on the front. Royalty sells almost as well as sex, and for that reason this book was clearly the victim of some not-quite-truthful packaging by its publisher. At least the book does include sex.

So, to prevent the tragedy of people accidentally reading a book that's about someone in the Tudor era who wasn't royalty, here's what people thinking of reading this book should know.

It's not about Mary Tudor. Shocking, I know. It's actually the story of a Spanish member of Prince Philip's entourage who is not royal and, in fact, doesn't even go to the palace except on occasion. Instead, he's stuck in England at the home of a noble family while he deals with office-level bureaucracy, xenophobia, the trials of adjusting to a strange new country, the anguish of homesickness and never knowing what's going on with his family back in Spain, and the complexities of maybe-perhaps-just-a-little-bit falling in love with an Englishwoman.

He lives in the streets of London, not the halls of Hampton Court, and he witnesses the politics of Mary's reign from the perspective of the people, which is a refreshing change from the 10 billion books that deal only with the people who made the policy. There's such a tendency in Tudor literature to ignore the average person in history and focus solely on the royalty, with the result that most books read like an in-depth treatment of the internal struggles of one person, with a tacked-on "oh yeah, and apparently the people of England are pissed and there are all these riots and stuff, but I can't describe them or the viewpoint of the population because I live in the palace and never go out into the streets and I only know what my messengers tell me!"

This is not one of those books.

There are so many things I loved about this book. The relationship between Rafael and the Englishwoman, Cecily, is so slow, so drawn-out, so gradual that it's one of the most believable romantic relationships I've ever read in a Tudor novel (where heaving bosoms and love at first sight seem to be the norm). And even once the romantic part happens, it's so clear-eyed and down-to-earth, so blessedly free of the usual purple prose and declarations of true love forever and ever and ever that usually clog such novels, that I had to remind myself what genre I was reading.

I loved the descriptions of Rafael's everyday life. Yes, his life in England is boring, but just because the main character is bored doesn't mean the reader must be too! It worries me that the reviewers here seem to think that if a character isn't out slaying dragons, he's boring. (Of course, if the main character had been Queen Mary, she would've spent the entire book sitting in a darkened room waiting for a nonexistent baby to be born - but that would've been interesting because she's royalty!) The fact is, this is not an adventure book, it's a descriptive book. It's a description of life in London, the politics and the trivialities and relationships, as experienced by Rafael.

And don't think that means it lacks drama. As the tension under Mary's reign rises, so does the tension in the book, threaded through with revelations about Rafael, his family and his relationships, as well. It all comes together in a shocker of an ending that will make you close the book and whisper to yourself, "Damn." That is, if you were actually paying attention to the characters in the book and not just turning pages to see if Mary herself would appear.

Finally, the people whining about the lack of Mary missed what was, to me, completely obvious - that Mary's presence throughout the novel is overwhelming. Mary herself only appears maybe three times - and thank the author for that! When I first picked up the book I thought, "A sundial designer becomes BFFs with Queen Mary and spends the whole book girl-talking with her? Yeah, no." Luckily, the cover is lying about that, too; while Rafael and Mary do share some weighty conversations, they never braid each other's hair and talk about their innermost feelings. And yet, though Mary is hardly in the novel at all, the whole novel is essentially the story of her actions and how they affected people who never had any contact with her. Everything that happens in the novel is a result of Mary's actions, and a powerful illustration of how profoundly people under an absolute monarchy were affected by the slightest actions of their sovereign. In a way, the book IS about Mary - whereas most novels tell the intimate story of the woman and the decisions she made, this one tells the other half of the story - the consequences of those decisions for an entire country.