Kings and Queens Rule this Week's Book Choices

We hope you will have a good time reading these three new books. This week’s great new reads are historical books featuring royalty, kings, and queens. Happy reading!

Enchantments: a Novel By Kathryn Harrison, March 2012, 314 pages. 

Author Kathryn Harrison has penned this lushly written enthralling novel set during the last days of the Romanov dynasty.  After her father’s body is pulled from the icy Neva River, 18 year old Masha Rasputin is sent to live with the Tsar’s family in the hope that she has her father’s healing abilities to help Aloysha’s hemophilia. Mesmerizing, haunting, and told in Harrison's signature prose, this novel is a love story about two people who come together as everything around them is falling apart.

The Sister Queens By Sophie Perinot.   March 2012, 498 pages.  

Lovers of Philippa Gregory will want to check out this debut novel about royal sisters who are separated by royal marriages, but never truly parted.   Perfect and elegant Marguerite weds handsome Louis IX of France, and soon learns that she must contend with a domineering mother in law and her husband’s increasing religious zealotry.  Passionate and strong-willed Eleanor marries the plainer Henry II of England, a good man who loves her but is not a good king.  This book is historical fiction at its most compelling, and is an unforgettable first novel.

Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England By Thomas Penn, March 2012, 448 pages.  

Henry VII’s reign, sandwiched between the darkness of Richard III’s and the glamour of his son Henry VIII’s, appears colorless.  But Thomas Penn’s well-written and vivid history illuminates this peculiar and interesting king called a “Dark Prince” by Francis Bacon.  Historians will love the depth of research and general readers will find this story of a victor who becomes a prisoner of his own fears to be a morality tale as well.

Reviews brought to you each week by librarians Jennifer Niederhausen, Dona Stein and Heather Timko, Adult Services Division, .