I had high hopes for this book and unfortunately, it did not live up to them. While I wouldn’t say this book was a total waste of time, it did take a lot longer to read than I thought it would. Granted, the book is over 600 pages long, but I always feel like a really good book goes so quickly despite its length. By the last 150 or so pages, I was just longing for the book to be finished.
The biggest cause of my boredom was that so much focus was placed on the loves of Elizabeth. She’s such a strong historical woman that I wanted to read more about her triumphs. Instead, I felt bogged down in mostly unrequited love and kept thinking “Isn’t there more to her mind than this?” It was almost as though we were missing out on some important things that happened during her reign, being distracted by her heart as the tale unfolds.
For example, there was little mention of William Shakespeare and few details about many of the things that went into the wars waged while she was on the throne. I guess you could say I would have liked a little less fiction, a little more history. At times it felt like this was just a really long romance novel, and really, if I wanted to read romance, I’d reach for that.
The nice thing is that there are so many different writings about this period in history, I needn’t look far to find a completely different telling of her story. Although I don’t have anything else slated on my list about her for the Historical Fiction Challenge, I believe that on my TBR pile there are other tales of Elizabeth that I will read in the future.
