August Read
I’m reading The Devil’s Brood ; the final book in a series about King Henry & Eleanor of Aquitaine. It is a bit more detailed than the previous novels.
From Booklist
As much the story of a family as a kingdom, this is the final installment in an exhaustive (and exhausting) trilogy about England’s Henry II and his queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, following When Christ and His Saints Slept (1995) and Time and Chance (2002). When the novel begins begins in 1172, Henry and Eleanor have been married 20 years, and though there is still great passion between them, there is also growing conflict. Henry is constantly at war with France, and his cause isn’t helped by Eleanor, whose scheming earns her a kind of house arrest. Meanwhile, Henry continues to juggle the needs of his kingdom and the demands of his fractious, sometimes rebellious sons. Teeming with characters and authentic period detail, the novel is part splendid pageant and part history lecture. Though the prose tends to lumber along like a medieval oxcart, historical fiction readers who love the period probably won’t mind, especially if they’ve read the previous two books in the series.

