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 After emerging the victorious king of Britain in the first book of the trilogy, Arthur now seeks peace with the many tribes and factions below him. His enemies have not vanished and he often is required to fight them, but he always offers agreeable terms, often allowing the belligerents to keep the land they’d contested for but under his rule. Some of Arthur’s Artoriani don’t understand this policy, and neither does Arthur’s wife, Gwenhwyfar, leading to conflict at home in addition to conflict throughout the country. Arthur’s most determined enemies have not vanished, however, and it is these whom he must face down if he intends to keep his kingdom intact.
I like this trilogy. There is really very little of the associated myths around Arthur, but it’s still easy to see how Hollick has worked with the evidence available to her to make a story that is both familiar and surprising at the same time. Characters who were introduced by the French in the high middle ages have vanished, for example, but Arthur is still plagued by Morgause, still sleeps with his half-sister and bears a child by her, and so on. This world is very rough, portraying a Britain caught between native Britons, Romans, and invading Germans, and gives a wonderful backdrop and feel to the story.
Nothing is easy for Arthur. He is portrayed as quite a brilliant warlord and wins his fair share of uphill battles, but when it comes to emotional matters, he tends to fall apart. Since he is both powerful and attractive, he appeals to many women, but he only loves his wife, Gwenhwyfar. Their marriage is fraught with trouble, just like a real marriage, which is a very nice touch. It’s obvious that they love each other, but some hardships are almost impossible to overcome. Arthur doesn’t hesitate to sleep around but is incredibly jealous whenever he thinks Gwenhwyfar might be attracted to another man, which is uncomfortable for the modern reader but is probably more suited to the time than fidelity on both sides.
I really liked the character of Gwenhwyfar; I believe she’s my favorite in the series. She is a strong, independent woman, but she also loves her husband and sons and makes space for everyone in her life. She makes mistakes, mostly driven by emotion, but they only make her more human. I definitely preferred her viewpoint and I am looking forward to more with the final book in the trilogy, Shadow of the King.
Pendragon’s Banner is an excellent continuation to a series about King Arthur that has an authentic feel to it, with great characters and a plot that will have its readers turning pages rapidly. Definitely recommended for fans of historical fiction and Arthurian legend.
Interested to hear more? Visit these other great sites on this blog tour:
The Tome Travellers Weblog (10/12)
A Reader’s Respite (10/12)
Carla Nayland’s Historical Fiction (10/13)
Enchanted by Josephine (10/14)
Fumbling with Fiction (10/14)
Found Not Lost (10/15)
Nan Hawthorne’s Booking the Middle Ages (10/15)
Jenny Loves to Read (10/16)
The Review From Here (10/17)
The Courtier’s Book (10/18)
Chick Loves Lit (10/19)
Love Romance Passion (10/20)
He Followed Me Home… Can I Keep Him? (10/20)
The Impasse Strikes Back (10/21)
S. Krishna’s Books (10/22)
Books Like Breathing (10/23)
Passages to the Past (10/24)
Virginie Says (10/25)
Readaholic (10/25)
Reading with Monie (10/26)
Rundpinne (10/26)
Books & Needlepoint (10/27)
Capricious Reader (10/27)
Books are my Only Friends (10/27)
A Sea of Books (10/28)
Bloody Bad (10/28)
Revenge of the Book Nerds! (10/28)
Booksie’s Blog (10/28)
Devourer of Books (10/29)
Peeking Between the Pages (10/29)
Starting Fresh (10/29)
Historical Tapestry (10/30)
Book Soulmates (10/30)
Susan’s Art & Words (10/30)
Steven Till (10/31)
Café of Dreams (10/31)
I am an Amazon Associate. I received this book from the publisher for review.
 Catherine Howard has grown up in the country, a relatively insignificant member of an incredibly powerful family. After the death of her cousin Anne Boleyn, the Howard family fortunes fell to some extent, but in 1540, things are about to change. Catherine’s uncle, the duke of Norfolk, brings her to court at age seventeen, when she is at her most beautiful, white-washing her reputation and placing her before the king. Catherine is no innocent but King Henry VIII falls in love with her, convinced that she is his rose without a thorn. When the members of her past come to court intent on blackmail, Catherine’s road to tragedy is assured.
This story is a familiar one for many Tudor enthusiasts, and clearly I’m no exception. I was looking forward to reading Haeger’s portrayal of this young queen. Considering Catherine probably slept with a variety of men, I would think it would be difficult for her to be a sympathetic character, but Haeger makes it look easy. She creates a Catherine that readers will wish had a different ending. Despite her sexual experience, Catherine does seem innocent and naive at times, completely a pawn for her powerful uncle and the Howard family strategy to gain favor. Once she’s gained the eye of the king, there is no looking back for this girl. Her downfall is indeed tragic because Haeger’s Catherine wishes in every instance for something different. When she finally settles into her role as queen and begins to hope she can be good for Henry and for the country, that hope is snatched away from her by her past.
While most of the third person narrative is focused on Catherine, we do occasionally get glimpses into the other characters’ heads, particularly that of Thomas Culpeper. The other characters are not quite so well-defined, but each of them feel intriguing and real, and this is a Tudor world that feels largely authentic and familiar. I enjoyed the rich descriptions, especially of Catherine’s dresses, and felt I could picture all of the players moving about the court, ambitions intact. The plot unfolds in a sensible way; virtually everyone who is interested in Tudor history will know that Catherine was beheaded by Henry VIII, so the book opens on the night before the execution. It then returns to the time when everything began to change for Catherine and the author can explain how she got to that point in her own way. It’s very well done and the book is a pleasure to read. Perhaps my only qualm with it is that Catherine never seems bothered by the fact that she sleeps with every man who looks at her twice. She does it out of boredom, but surely she must worry about pregnancy at the very least. No one seems to lament the loss of her virginity except as it pertains to the king, which did seem strange to me since surely any other nobleman would like his wife to be a virgin, but it’s only a minor part of the story.
Overall, I would recommend The Queen’s Mistake to Tudor enthusiasts and other fans of historical fiction. It’s a well-written peek into the past, with sympathetic characters and an engaging sense of history.
Do you want a copy of your own? Leave a comment here saying you’d like to enter and you can win one of two trade paperback copies from the publisher. This contest is only open to those with a US address and will be open until November 11th. Good luck!
I received this book from the publisher for review. I’m an Amazon Associate.
 At first, Mamah Cheney knew Frank Lloyd Wright as the brilliant architect who was going to design her new house. While he did, they developed a close friendship, but on realizing their bounds, stepped away from each other purposely. It didn’t last long and soon they fell headlong into an affair that shocked both their families and the world. Both Mamah and Frank struggle to find their identities in the face of a hostile world and their own love.
I thought I was going to enjoy this far more than I did and to be honest it was a disappointing work that didn’t meet its full potential. The idea of humanizing and developing the love story between one of America’s greatest architects and his mistress, who appears to have been more or less reviled at the time, is at first a great one, and the book starts out promisingly. The characters struggle with the damage they’ve done to their families and themselves in the name of a “free love” which no one can understand but them.
By the time Frank and Mamah start to explore Europe, though, they had lost me. For one thing, Mamah is not a very sympathetic character. She places the discovery of the meaning of her life before her children and before Frank and it’s difficult to agree with her choice when it involves merely translating another woman’s works. Did she really have to seek out solitude and hurt everyone she loved for something that she could have done in their presence? Moreover, I didn’t like the philosophies that Ellen Key espoused and to be honest, didn’t like Ellen herself, and wished Mamah had the fortitude to write herself rather than give a voice to someone else. These are doubts that she herself struggles with, and even that bothered me to an extent. Much of this book is wrapped up in Mamah’s thoughts, regretting what she’d done and who she’d hurt, yet largely failing to right any wrongs she thought she had committed.
Frank isn’t much better, as he is brilliant but something of a wastrel, spending money on extravagances, going to faraway places, and even at times pushing Mamah into his ideal vision. This is a book with characters so flawed that they got on my nerves, and while that may be realistic, it does mean I had trouble going back to the book and concluded my dislike for it. It didn’t help that I hated the ending. Honestly, this is a true story, so I feel like it’s wrong to say that, because it would also have irked me if Nancy Horan had made up something else.
In the end, I didn’t like the characters, didn’t like where the story wound up, and didn’t like the philosophical dilemmas in between. Loving Frank was not a book for me.
 As the eldest daughter of Edward IV and wife of Henry VII, Elizabeth of York presents a link of continuity between the extravagant Yorkist rule and the more conservative Tudor dynasty. At one time, two would-be kings competed for England’s crown, and with it Elizabeth’s hand in marriage. The Battle of Bosworth Field changed the course of history and Elizabeth’s role was in the very center of English politics. Margaret Campbell Barnes imagines how Elizabeth may have felt and reacted to her pivotal position, giving this occasionally neglected queen a voice of her own in one of the most recently popular periods in English history.
I’ve mentioned before that the Wars of the Roses are the latest popular trend in historical fiction. I’m fairly pleased with this as it’s my own area of special interest and I like to see how different fiction writers have portrayed all of these characters with whom I am so familiar. Sourcebooks’ release of The Tudor Rose comes at a perfect time and despite the fact that it was written years ago, it isn’t very dated. Interestingly, Barnes interprets history in ways that stray wildly from today’s popular positions. For example, Henry VII’s mother Margaret Beaufort, often portrayed as a tyrant who controlled her son and stifled his wife, is here a friend to Elizabeth, and Elizabeth happily allows Margaret to tend to those nasty administrative tasks that she would rather miss out on. Elizabeth herself is a charming character. She is fairly quiet and submissive but she loves deeply and she has a great deal of courage and strength. As readers, we want her to find love and happiness, because she is clearly so deserving of it.
In terms of plot, The Tudor Rose follows the life of Elizabeth of York from her childhood engagement to the French dauphin to a point within a year of her death. As such, there isn’t really any sort of tension; many readers will know how the story ends. It could feel slow, but it’s a very pleasant journey, and a lovely imagining of the late fifteenth century. The book feels rich with detail, fine gowns and palaces, and will surely appeal to those of us who love to read about royalty. And it’s always worth finding out what another author has done with the Princes in the Tower, particularly given that this book has a long enough timeline to include the revolt against Henry VII by Perkin Warbeck.
In short, The Tudor Rose is a wonderful historical read and well worth curling up with for immersion into another world, if not for those who crave excitement in their books.
Would you like to win a copy of your own? Sourcebooks is sponsoring a giveaway of one copy to a US or Canadian address. No P.O. boxes please! Just leave a comment to enter. This contest will run until midnight on October 20th. The winner of this contest is Stephanie.
 After the Civil War is over, John Bell Hood, defeated Confederate general, moves to New Orleans seeking a future. The war has irreparably scarred him, changing not only his view on life but his very body; he’s missing a leg and the use of one arm. In New Orleans he meets a woman to love, Anna Marie Hennen, has almost a dozen children, and finds himself enmeshed in a society and a history that is not his own, which he finds he must pull apart in order to properly understand, until the yellow fever takes everything.
Civil war fiction is always a tough sell with me and I have no idea why. Fleetingly, I hoped Robert Hicks could buck the trend, as a few notable authors had done before, but unfortunately this book did not strike a chord with me. Strange, because it focuses on a fascinating historical figure and his transformation from an arrogant man into a humanitarian one. New Orleans itself is fascinating and I found myself looking up its history as I went along (only on wikipedia, but still!). I really enjoyed the characters’ forays into the forests and the conflicts between the Creoles and the Americans, not to mention the depiction of changing attitudes towards race. A Separate Country has plenty of interesting hot button topics to consider, even more as the novel moves towards a conclusion.
The book is told through a trio of important characters. The first is Eli Griffin, an iceman, who would never have been in New Orleans or anywhere near General Hood if not for his family’s fate in the war. Eli has been entrusted with Hood’s book, a memoir, ensuring that it makes publication. Fulfilling Hood’s dying requests makes up his part of the book; other sections are told from Hood’s perspective from the war to his death and the rest of the chapters are from Anna Marie’s viewpoint, written to her daughter Lydia as she is on her deathbed. These are not spoilers, we gather this information in the first few pages of the novel.
I think overall the problem for me with the book is that none of these characters were particularly compelling. I find it difficult to sympathize with this Confederate general. His arrogance and blindness at times is overwhelming and even his moves towards a more likeable personality didn’t quite pull off redeeming him in my eyes. The worst, though, was Anna Marie, who admits that she is shallow, finds her children a burden after the first one, and inadvertently causes misery for almost all of her friends. Normally I like when characters are made more human due to their flaws, but to be honest, these had me driven up the wall.
I do think there is a good book here. It just is not a book for me.
 David Martin is an aspiring writer of suspenseful stories in early twentieth century Barcelona. When opportunities to write professionally present themselves, he quickly seizes them, the desire to be published overriding everything, including his common sense. With his earnings, Martin moves into a tower house, abandoned for decades, but with the sentimental value of a place he’s passed every day on his way to success. But when Martin receives an unusual offer and begins to learn more about his strange abode, he realizes that he is playing a far deeper game than he’d ever imagined.
My favorite aspect of Zafon’s writing is the atmosphere he evokes with his works. This was amazingly well done in The Shadow of the Wind, which I read before I began blogging, and I had high hopes here as well. Zafon did not let me down. Almost immediately, he draws us into a world of half-truths in the depths of Barcelona. Impending tragedy always seems to hang over Martin, right from the beginning, and it’s as though the book is clogged with dark, rainy nights and suspenseful midnight meetings. It’s hard to describe, but it’s easy to live in this world. Even Martin’s apartment is compelling and virtually a living part of the mystery.
When not writing, Martin is also obsessed with his love, Cristina, even though it takes years before she recognizes him. This love story goes in a very peculiar direction but adds to the eerie feel of the work. Throughout, we’re uncertain as to whether Martin’s experiences are real or imaginary, particularly as the story gets crazy. By the halfway point, I was surprised by how tense the story was getting; I found myself reading a thriller! The literary touch and the atmosphere, plus the added uncertainty about Martin’s mental state, are really what make this book something special. Towards the end of the book, the plot starts to unravel to some extent, but I was still curious about it.
The Shadow of the Wind was a book for readers. The Angel’s Game is less so; I think it’s much closer to a book for writers, but since I’m not really one, it didn’t draw me in quite the same way. So I can’t say I really liked it more but I definitely enjoyed reading it. I wanted to know what happened next. The ending didn’t answer all of my questions, but that rarely happens. I would recommend this, especially if you enjoyed The Shadow of the Wind.
 Courtney Stone is a certified Jane Austen addict. She owns all the books and sinks into them every time she needs comfort, entertainment, or love. When she wakes up in Regency England one morning, with the Austen-like name of Jane Mansfield, she is at first in shock, especially when she is threatened with a mental institution and bled to the point of weakness. Courtney/Jane recovers and begins to settle into Regency life with the addition of the extremely handsome and polite Mr. Edgeworth and his sister. She thinks she recognizes Mr. Edgeworth for what he is, a womanizer just like her ex-fiance who broke her heart by cheating on her. To get back home, Courtney realizes that she needs to unravel the secrets of Jane’s past, including her relationship with Edgeworth, and confront her own insecurities and problems with the men in her life.
I think I expected a little more out of this than I got. The beginning was a little disappointing. First of all, Courtney spends far too long in bed denying that she is actually Jane and fretting about how to get back into her old life, much less fit into this one. When she gets up she is perfectly capable of speaking English with a perfect English accent as well as sewing, dancing, and knowing which fork to use while eating. While this makes her transition easier, it made it harder for me to accept her complaining. Given that the premise of the book was her new life in the England of Jane Austen, Courtney spent far too much time being shocked. She can’t just settle in but I was impatient for the story to get going.
Luckily, I liked the book much better once Courtney got out of bed and assumed Jane’s life. Once that happened, I finally got pulled into the story. The mysteries surrounding the past of Jane and Edgeworth were interesting and I wanted to see why they’d fallen out. I liked Jane’s friend Miss Edgeworth and I enjoyed the development of her character over the course of the book. I also thought that the way Courtney’s memories were interspersed with her Regency life were well done; she reflected on her past at appropriate points and I was curious as to the resolution.
This was a fun, relaxing read. Courtney’s problems are never too threatening, and while we feel sorry for her, we’re pretty sure she’s getting her Happily Ever After. I enjoyed the romance between Courtney and Edgeworth and I wanted to know what had happened in the past so they could settle down for the future. Despite that, I thought the ending was, honestly, a bit of a cop-out, and let me down after what otherwise was a very entertaining story. I enjoyed the book enough, though, to be interested in checking out Ms. Rigler’s next book, Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, which takes Jane Mansfield into Courtney Stone’s life. I have a feeling that with both stories resolved, my qualms about the first book will fade away, and I will have the ending that I really, really want.
Recommended for a light, fun read, especially for lovers of Jane Austen or historical fiction.
Available from IndieBound, Powell’s, Amazon, and Amazon UK.
 Adam Swann is a soldier, but he’s sick of fighting. Left for dead on a battlefield in India, Adam opens his eyes to spot a ruby necklace, the means for funding his dreams. When he recovers from his illness, he heads to England and decides to start a shipping company after taking the advice of a railroad man and exploring England on his horse. On his way home, he spots a young girl, half-undressed and washing in a puddle. This is Henrietta Rawlinson, daughter of a cotton giant, fleeing from an arranged marriage that makes her feel ill. Adam takes her with him, marries her, and launches Swann-on-Wheels, their brainchild. As the company grows and expands, so do the couple’s fortunes, and this novel is their epic story.
I want to start off by saying that this book took me a week to read but I loved every minute of it. I read a few smaller books in between, but I just adored spending so much time in Victorian England. I felt like I lived in Adam and Henrietta’s world and could understand their issues and problems but also cheer for them to push forward, move past whatever problems they were having, and succeed at everything. This is the kind of book that becomes a favorite, at least for me, because I love huge complex stories like this.
Since this novel was originally written in 1970, I assumed it would feel dated, but it really doesn’t. Even its treatment of women is open-minded; Edith remarks that women could rule companies very easily, were they given a chance, and then Henrietta actually does take the reins of leadership and proves herself an astonishingly capable woman both at home and at work. This may be a bit anachronistic for the mid-19th century, but having smart female characters to care about makes this an immeasurably better novel than it would have been otherwise. I felt a little uneasy with the fact that Henrietta’s character changes because Adam pushes it to do so, but as the novel progressed it became clear that he’d just given her an opportunity rather than actually pushing her at all; that was just how he thought of it.
I loved, loved, loved that this was set in Victorian England and didn’t just focus on London, but the entire country, and more so that specific issues are highlighted and addressed. For example, the use of children as chimney sweeps was a huge dilemma, and it’s brought right home here. The novel also includes workers’ strikes and the changing attitude towards employment going on around this time. The Swanns do have a comparatively cushy life, but we see how hard Adam works and his financial difficulties, so it is vastly different in feel than a book focusing on the aristocracy, for example. We even have mention of the Civil War in the USA and how it affected production in England; there is a sense of history here as historical events happen with Adam and Henrietta and their managers on what feels like the forefront of a new England. It’s a heady feeling; it’s a heady book.
If I had to say one negative thing about the book, though, it would mainly be that the setting up of Adam’s company does bog down at times. The beginning of the book took me much longer because it was more about the logisitics of his company than about the people in the book. I enjoyed the detail about setting up a company and being introduced to all the secondary characters, but I would have been happier with less. By contrast, I loved the sections about the main characters that followed, and once the business got off the ground the book sped much more quickly. I had at first set myself a goal of reading 50 pages each day, but by page 200 I knew I couldn’t go that slowly.
God Is an Englishman was a delightful, absorbing, utterly fascinating read. I could happily have kept on reading more. This is the start of a series, so while this book ended in a nice solid fashion, I know I’m going to seek out the rest of the series as soon as I can.
 It is the end of Bess’s junior year at Loretto Academy, a high school for girls run by nuns in the shadow of Niagara Falls. She knows something is wrong when her father doesn’t appear at the graduation ceremony and when the nuns inexplicably present her with farewell gifts; her father has been fired from his job as the director of the Niagara Power Company. Bess must return home, care for her suddenly ill sister Isabel, and assist her mother in dressmaking to keep the family afloat. On the way from Loretto, a young man carries her trunk, and later passes by her house, with the gift of a fish. Bess had counted on hardship, but she hadn’t counted on love with a riverman or the future she would have.
There are many things to love about this book. The prose is gorgeous, for one thing, as are the descriptions. It’s almost possible to feel the cool mist off the falls, as the characters do, or the deadly beauty of the whirlpools. Bess is a strong woman up there with the best of them, coping with her family’s losses and tragedy and somehow managing every single time. Her strength grows over the course of the novel, from a girl afraid of what her mother is thinking to a woman that has her own business and is ready to turn down society ladies regardless of what they think. There is all the innocence and wonder of a first love affair, more so because this one is so explicit, that conflict between duty and desire.
And yet there was somehow a lack of connection. I liked the book, but I didn’t love it. Bess is a sympathetic character but always from a distance; by the end of the novel she has grown so strong that any attempts to empathize with her feel as though they would be pushed away. It felt as though she didn’t experience emotions strongly enough at that point, she just moved on. The book had potential to be one of a series of great, sweeping romances marred with tragedy, but it stopped just short. Or maybe I just was in the mood for something more explicit, or perhaps I’m just lucky that I’ve never had to be that strong. To be honest, I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the book is in present tense, which always feels more distant to me.
I much preferred the historical bits. I loved learning more about Niagara Falls and that Tom Cole was based on a real man. The pictures evoke a sense of history a little bit stronger than the words themselves and the newspaper articles, fictional or not, fleshed out the history of the story without long or boring exposition. I was interested in the sewing techniques and the dresses Bess described, in the books she was reading, in the new electric appliances that houses had. I was fascinated by the setting and I wouldn’t mind spending a little more time there.
Though I liked and didn’t love The Day the Falls Stood Still, I’d still recommend it for those who enjoy historical fiction or are looking for a compelling love story.
Please welcome Michelle Moran to Medieval Bookworm today! She has graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions here. I hope you enjoy the answers as much as I did.
1. What drew you to tell Selene’s story and move into ancient Rome?
Actually, it all began with a dive. Not the kind of dive you take into a swimming pool, but the kind where you squeeze yourself into a wetsuit and wonder just how tasty your rump must appear to passing sharks now that it looks like an elephant seal. My husband and I had taken a trip to Egypt, and at the suggestion of a friend, we decided to go to Alexandria to see the remains of Cleopatra’s underwater city. Let it be known that I had never gone scuba diving before, but after four days with an instructor (and countless questions like, “Will there be sharks? How about jellyfish? If there is an earthquake, what happens underwater?”) we were ready for the real thing.
We drove one morning to the Eastern Harbor in Alexandria. Dozens of other divers were already there, waiting to see what sort of magic lay beneath the waves. I wondered if the real thing could possibly live up to all of the guides and brochures selling this underwater city, lost for thousands of years until now. Then we did the dive, and it was every bit as magical as everyone had promised. We saw the blocks that once formed Marc Antony’s summer palace, came face to face with Cleopatra’s enigmatic sphinx, and floated above ten thousand ancient artifacts, including obelisks, statues, and countless amphorae. By the time we surfaced, I was Cleopatra-obsessed. I wanted to know what had happened to her city once she and Marc Antony had committed suicide. Where did all of its people go? Were they allowed to remain or were they killed by the Romans? And what about her four children?
It was this last question that surprised me the most. I had always assumed that Cleopatra’s children had all been murdered. But the Roman conqueror, Octavian, actually spared the three she bore to Marc Antony: her six-year-old son, Ptolemy, and her ten-year-old twins, Alexander and Selene. As soon as I learned that Octavian had taken the three of them to Rome for his Triumph, I knew at once I had my next book. And when I discovered what Cleopatra’s daughter lived through while in exile – rebellion, loss, triumph, love – I absolutely couldn’t wait to start writing. I can only hope that the novel is as exciting and intriguing as the research proved to be. It may be two thousand years in the past, but a great love story, as they say, is timeless.
2. Is there a little known fact about ancient Rome or Egypt that you think everyone should know?
I’m not sure I could pick out just one fact! Perhaps I’d simply like people to know how similar ancient Romans and Egyptians were to us today. In ancient Egypt, Nefertiti’s daughter had her own perfume line, and in ancient Rome, women used curling irons and had an ancient form of bras. These two incredible civilizations really paved the way for how we live life today.
3. Do you have an absolute favorite period in history?
I wish I did! It would make choosing my next book so much easier! No. But I have particular periods I’m drawn to, such as the ancient world, the Middle Ages, the 18th century, and the Victorian era.
 4. Why did you choose to write historical fiction?
It all began on an archaeological dig. During my sophomore year in college, I found myself sitting in Anthropology 101, and when the professor mentioned that she was looking for volunteers who would like to join a dig in Israel, I was one of the first students to sign up. When I got to Israel, however, all of my archaeological dreams were dashed (probably because they centered around Indiana Jones). There were no fedora wearing men, no cities carved into rock, and certainly no Ark of the Covenant. I was very disappointed. Not only would a fedora have seemed out of place, but I couldn’t even use the tiny brushes I had packed. Apparently, archaeology is more about digging big ditches with pickaxes rather than dusting off artifacts. And it had never occurred to me until then that in order to get to those artifacts, one had to dig deep into the earth. Volunteering on an archaeological dig was hot, it was sweaty, it was incredibly dirty, and when I look back on the experience through the rose-tinged glasses of time, I think, Wow, was it fantastic! Especially when our team discovered an Egyptian scarab that proved the ancient Israelites had once traded with the Egyptians. Looking at that scarab in the dirt, I began to wonder who had owned it, and what had possessed them to undertake the long journey from their homeland to the fledgling country of Israel.
On my flight back to America I stopped in Berlin, and with a newfound appreciation for Egyptology, I visited the museum where Nefertiti’s limestone bust was being housed. The graceful curve of Nefertiti’s neck, her arched brows, and the faintest hint of a smile were captivating to me. Who was this woman with her self-possessed gaze and stunning features? I wanted to know more about Nefertiti’s story, but when I began the research into her life, it proved incredibly difficult. She’d been a woman who’d inspired powerful emotions when she lived over three thousand years ago, and those who had despised her had attempted to erase her name from history. Yet even in the face of such ancient vengeance, some clues remained.
As a young girl Nefertiti had married a Pharaoh who was determined to erase the gods of Egypt and replace them with a sun-god he called Aten. It seemed that Nefertiti’s family allowed her to marry this impetuous king in the hopes that she would tame his wild ambitions. What happened instead, however, was that Nefertiti joined him in building his own capital of Amarna where they ruled together as god and goddess. But the alluring Nefertiti had a sister who seemed to keep her grounded, and in an image of her found in Amarna, the sister is standing off to one side, her arms down while everyone else is enthusiastically praising the royal couple. From this image, and a wealth of other evidence, I tried to recreate the epic life of an Egyptian queen whose husband was to become known as the Heretic King.
5. Since I know you go on amazing research trips, can you give us a hint of where you might be going next? Anywhere you would love to go but haven’t managed yet?
My next trip will be through Scandinavia. I’m very interested in the history of the Vikings and I’ve been intending to make this trip for quite some time. I would love to go to Mongolia, and it’s possible that my husband and I (my traveling partner) will add this on to our Scandinavian trip. It’s always been a goal of mine to see the Genghis Khan Festival there.
6. What’s ahead for your next book? Do you plan on returning to the ancient world soon?
For my fourth novel, I will be departing from the ancient world to write about the French Revolution. This book will be about the life of Madame Tussaud, in which young Marie Tussaud joins the gilded but troubled court of Marie Antoinette, and survives the French Revolution by creating death masks of the beheaded aristocracy.
7. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the readers of Medieval Bookworm?
Just that it is a pleasure to be here, and that I hope your readers enjoy my very first adult/YA crossover in the historical fiction genre!
Thanks Michelle! To learn more, you can visit her website and blog, and check out the awesome contest she’s holding in independent bookstores across the USA! Please also note that yesterday, I reviewed Cleopatra’s Daughter, and today is the last day to enter my contest for a signed copy.
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