MY STORY: 1700s

The '45 Rising takes place during the Jacobite rising of 1745. While I like the language of the book, the story reads like a bad romance novel. The diary author is all about clothes and parties and men and blah blah blah. Politics of course are a major topic, too.

Then it takes a turn when instead of one of her other proposals, Euphemia and her cousin decide they're in love.

No mention of their being first cousins. Guess this was okay in 1745 Scotland. 

So he goes to fight on the opposite side as the rest of the family and ends up changing his mind after he gets wounded. She sleeps with him unmarried at age 15 and gets knocked up, then he gets shot and she has to marry someone else to cover up the baby scandal.

Not exactly appropriate for a children's historical fiction series.

No Way Back is actually part of a series within the My Story series called My True Story. I will not be buying the others in the series, because I've just got so many of these books as it is and I don't need to buy more! I still need two more to complete this set. Plus, several are war and suffrage. Blech.

Anyway, this one is about Mary Wade, who was a young convict transported to Australia. She came in with the Second Fleet and ended up having so many kids that her descendants today number in the tens of thousands.

This story of transportation focuses on her life before the theft, her trial and time in jail, and her life aboard the ship. The book basically ends once she hits Australia.

It was pretty good and I knew her name sounded familiar, but it wasn't til I reached the end that I was like "Oh, yeah, she was real."

Elizabeth's book is set entirely in Australia with her telling her story to her newest master and his son and daughter. She doesn't dwell on prison or ship life, so combined, these two books paint a decent picture of early transportation. Elizabeth's is basically about starvation. It's a good read though. The only flaw is that My Story doesn't do epilogues and there are some characters that you really want an ending for. She was one of those.

Fall of the Blade is about a young French girl from an aristocratic family and the turmoil of the French Revolution. The beginning is decent, then she and her parents begin travelling from prison to prison, culminating in her being alone in Paris. She manages to escape rather too easily, conveniently meets up with the guy she rescued at the beginning, and they run off to England together.

No epilogue. No telling what happened to her brother or parents or dog. That's it. Just in England and safe. Nothing else. Yuk. I remember not liking this one the first time I read it and the poor ending is exactly why.

MY STORY: 1600s

Civil War isn't a typical war book, which is nice. The male character is said to be too young to fight, when not that many books ago, we had 12-year-old archers.

This is the English Civil War with Charles I vs. the Roundheads, which I don't know much about. I kind of don't care either. Heh. There are certain parts of history I'm meh about.

Thomas's story is quite interesting though and he does a lot of different things. So it's worth the read.

The plague book is also pretty interesting. The girl is from a semi-wealthy family, but ends up trapped in her house, nursing her aunt, who eventually dies from the plague. Alice doesn't catch it herself, but has to wait out 40 days in her house until she's deemed safe to leave. Then she discovers her father was also sick and is stuck in one of the "pesthouses." So she tries to go to her uncle's farm, but they're not letting anyone from the city in. Back home she goes and her father ends up with her soon. There's a place where the diary could easily have ended, but then there's this whole bit tacked on months later where she's suddenly got a boyfriend and then the great fire happens. All that just feels like a useless bit of extra info, not a real story.

Highway Girl is okay. Most of the story, despite the title, is NOT about being a robber. And the ending sucks. I'm glad the three main characters get a happy ending, or at least what they wanted for the time being, but the way it happens sucks.

MY STORY: Tudor

I zipped through the Tudor/Elizabethan books over the past few days.

Lady Jane Grey is not one of my favorite subjects to begin with, but add to that a heaping helping of abusive parents and this book was painful to read. I felt like it went on too long but the entries kept jumping ahead in time and it also felt like it wasn't telling the whole story. Not the best book I've read about her.

Bloody Tower covers a similar time period. Tilly is the daughter of the Tower's doctor, so she's right there for a lot of the action, but as a commoner, she's a better character. The book covers the death of Edward, the turmoil with Lady Jane Grey, Mary's bloody rule, and finally ends with Elizabeth in power at last.

My only real complaint about it is that once again, we've got abusive parents. Not her father so much, but her mother "boxes her ears" on multiple occasions.

To Kill a Queen continues the story with Tilly's daughter as the diary author.

Tilly has married a nobleman who's in mysterious service to Queen Elizabeth. Kitty (Catherine) is the oldest daughter of the family, but she has older and younger siblings.

The family is right in the middle of the plot to kill Elizabeth, only Tilly's just slowly piecing everything together. One of her elder brothers made friends with Anthony Babington, who was one of the masterminds behind a plot to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.

It's an exciting story and pretty fast-paced, although I was saddened to see that Tilly didn't learn a thing from her mother and has boxed her daughter's ears at some point.

What is it with abusive parents? Can't these authors write something decent?

Armada at least has a father that's only verbally abusive and that's reconciled a bit at the end.

It's a ship book. Nothing new here really. Asshole crew member that Thomas has a problem with. Ship terminology. Battles. The same old same old.

But seriously, three different authors and four different books, and every one has at least one abusive parent incident. Blech!

MY STORY: Tudors Round 1

So what's the first big Tudor story? The six wives of Henry VIII, of course. Author Alison Prince tackles all six in a trilogy of books, although the first two I believe are also collected together, so you can do two books as well.

My Tudor Queen is the diary of a young woman who is a close friend of Catherine of Aragon. She functions as her translator, so she speaks both Spanish and English, amongst other things.

The diary is not the most exciting thing, because honestly, Catherine's story isn't that exciting. I liked the beginning, but after Arthur's death, it's just the Spanish people being broke until Henry VII dies and Henry VIII finally can marry Catherine. Then it gets interesting again, because they cover the part where he goes off to France and leaves her to fight the Scots. And then it ends.

The second book has Eva's daughter Elinor at court, first working for Catherine of Aragon, then getting moved into the household of the upstart Anne Boleyn. The author is really clear that she does not like Anne. I don't think I've ever read a nastier portrayal of her. She doing death threats and plots left and right and it's only at the very end when she's going to be executed that she's given some more humanity. Definitely not the best Anne Boleyn book, that's for sure. If you happen to not like her, you'll enjoy it. I like Catherine of Aragon probably secondmost of the wives, but I don't think Anne needs quite this bad a portrayal.

This third and much longer book finishes the remaining four wives. Beatrice, the girl writing the diary, is a neighbor of Eva and Elinor's, the latter two having left court and moved out into the countryside more.

You can also see Alison Prince's dislike of the nobility, because every one of her main characters has married commoners. Eva marries the court jester, Elinor a blacksmith and Bee ends up with a cook (Elinor's brother).

The beginning of this book is Bee reading both Eva and Elinor's diaries, so it's quite boring, because many passages are just copy and paste from those books. It functions to make this a standalone about all six wives, but it doesn't do them justice, so I don't see the point in it.

Bee is on the outskirts of things for Jane Seymour. Prince also seems to not like her, because this is the only semi-negative portrayal of Jane. Elinor painted her as almost as scheming as Anne Boleyn in her diary and now in Bee's she's more demanding and shrewish during her pregnancy.

Anne of Cleves gets a good run. The quality you see most in her is cleverness and her only negative points are knowing nothing about sex, which the court ladies fix quickly, and perhaps being a bit too nice. Anne is my favorite wife, so I was satisfied with this. Although there is this whole bit about one of the guys saying she smells and that's kind of never resolved. Bee worked for her and never said anything the opposite. Like seriously, you people barely bathe and you piss on floors. How good can any of you smell?

Katherine Howard is given the stupid, common slut angle. More stupid than anything else really, but then the slut part comes out. Culpepper is really glossed over though, which I thought was odd. Most books about her have it a bit more obvious what went on there before everyone's on trial.

And Katherine Parr gets a decent portrayal, although definitely commenting on her bad taste in men. Stupid Thomas Seymour.

The book is quite long and it gets a bit boring in several places, but it gets the story told. Albeit with some pretty obvious bias against some of the wives.

And now I'm taking a break from My Story, because I need Lady Jane Grey's book before I continue. Great. That's gonna end well.

MY STORY: Agincourt

The next several books are Tudor and will be put in one or possibly two reviews, so I figured I'd pop Agincourt in here first.

I like these older war books better than more modern ones. Things were so much more basic back then with archers vs. other archers, early siege stuff, knights, etc.

Agincourt tells the story of Henry V's miraculous win over French troops even though he had way less men on his side, men who were starving, sick and exhausted.

The most interesting bit for me is that the majority of the archers, who were like 80% of the English army, were boys from 12-17.

It's a good book. A war book, but a good war book. 

MY STORY: Romans and Britons and Vikings (oh, my)

This final trio of ancient world books does its job well. They read like a story, but also have a lot of historical detail included.

Claudia's book is set in Pompeii a short while before the inevitable eruption. She's what I'd call Roman middle class. She's not an aristocrat, but her family is wealthy. Her father is an ex-slave who made his fortune by baking. Her mother is from Egypt, which is pretty cool, but I wish Reid had done more with. The book gives an interesting look at the life of a middle class Roman teenager as well as what happens in the face of a natural disaster.

I have a different cover for Roman Invasion, but this is my preferred cover style, so I'll be posting these whenever I can.

Bran is taken captive along with his mother, younger sister and three cousins. The older male cousins are shipped off to Rome, likely to die in the arenas. Bran is sent with thousands of Roman soldiers to work on road construction. The threat hangs over his head that if he tries to escape or if his people attack, his mother and sister will be killed.

Bran is put in the charge of the Greek surveyor and his nephew, who's around Bran's age. The nephew was born unable to vocalize anything, so he's a different character than you'd expect to see. His disability is actually key to why the surveyor is there, which is explained in the book.

This book gives you a good idea of how the Roman army works and how the Roman empire has grown so much so successfully. It also has insights into the ways of the Briton peoples, although you learn more about the Romans than about them, which is a bit odd, considering Bran is Briton.

Viking Blood is another good one. A good story wrapped in information about the Viking society and especially loads of good Norse mythology. The text frequently stops to tell a myth, which is written in a different font.

I liked all of the characters in these three books. Definitely a step up from the Egyptian ones!

Next up is Agincourt and then we move into several books about the Tudors, which I'm excited to reread, and in one case, read for the first time.

MY STORY: Ancient Egypt

My Story is the UK's version of Dear America. The main differences, aside from the obvious, are that both the girl and boy books are in one series and that some of the books are in diary form and some are more typical chapters. There does seem to be a My Royal Story division, but that only comes with the later additions. Also, there is some overlap with Dear America and the Royal Diaries. My Story includes some of the books written for DA and Royal Diaries.

There are a lot of these books with multiple cover styles. This one to the left is one of the newer ones. I prefer the look of the older covers myself, but it won't be until the 6th book that I can point that out with an accompanying photo. The five oldest books going in historical order all have the newer white covers.

Pyramid of Secrets is about an Egyptian orphan boy who lived during the building of the pyramids of Giza. Khufu's is finished and he's deceased, but the boy and his uncle are working on Khafre's. The boy's father was killed in an accident while building the pyramids, so he bears a grudge against the entire process, which makes him an easy target to be used by some prisoners also in the working camps.

This book was well-written and seemingly well-researched. I don't remember any glaring errors. It gives a nice idea of what it was like during these building projects and like Maia's book from my previous review, you get a glimpse of Ancient Egyptian daily life for non-royals.

Princess of Egypt, despite the rather boring cover line, is the diary of Hatshepsut when she was about 14. This is not just any Egyptian girl. I haven't read this in years, but it annoys me just as much as I remember.

You see, the author uses a lot of British slang and modern phrasings that pull you into today and don't leave you steeped in ancient Egypt. "Mum" was used and I swear "chap" was in there. And she actually counted "Eeny meeny miny mo" and said "puh-lease." Hatshepsut also goes by the nickname Asha, which there is absolutely no record of and I think dumbs down her character even more than the language of the book already does. And Thutmose II is portrayed as a complete drunken idiot, which does him disservice.

This one really is not worth reading. The plot is your stereotypical evil vizier fare and it really does not teach anything about Egypt other books don't handle better. It's sad that Hatshepsut's one entry into all these historical fiction series I read is complete shit.