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I don't read as much as I once did, so it's really nice to find a new book that really makes you think. Sarah Gristwood's Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses takes a confusing period of history and gives it very human faces.
It's not the easiest book to read. It covers the lives of more than a half dozen women and their families through a period of history that has more twists, turns and betrayals than a daytime TV soap opera. The first names of many of the women central to the story are the same and though Gristwood gives a 'Glossary of Select Names' up front in the book, it's sometimes is easy to forget which Margaret or Elizabeth she's talking about, especially when she is talking about more than one generation at once.
The strong point of the book is how it makes you think of the people in human terms. All the names and dates are in there, but instead of totally focusing on the men slaughtering each other for power, this book also emphasizes what it took to keep families and lives together when devastating losses came from those battles and when the normal flow of mortality in those days destroyed well made plans. It tells, among others, the story of Marguerite of Anjou trying to run a war for her increasingly feeble minded husband Henry VI; the story of Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IV trying and failing to protect her younger son from her brother-in-law Richard III's coup; and the story of Margaret Beaufort, who lived through all of it from the days of Henry VI to the coronation of her grandson as Henry VIII.
It's not the easiest book to read. It covers the lives of more than a half dozen women and their families through a period of history that has more twists, turns and betrayals than a daytime TV soap opera. The first names of many of the women central to the story are the same and though Gristwood gives a 'Glossary of Select Names' up front in the book, it's sometimes is easy to forget which Margaret or Elizabeth she's talking about, especially when she is talking about more than one generation at once.
The strong point of the book is how it makes you think of the people in human terms. All the names and dates are in there, but instead of totally focusing on the men slaughtering each other for power, this book also emphasizes what it took to keep families and lives together when devastating losses came from those battles and when the normal flow of mortality in those days destroyed well made plans. It tells, among others, the story of Marguerite of Anjou trying to run a war for her increasingly feeble minded husband Henry VI; the story of Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IV trying and failing to protect her younger son from her brother-in-law Richard III's coup; and the story of Margaret Beaufort, who lived through all of it from the days of Henry VI to the coronation of her grandson as Henry VIII.