The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak

 

Reviews

This book is “a work of narrative nonfiction based on primary sources”, so it probably does not contain the full truth about the lives of the two queens, but rather an imaginary reality that can be read from the archival records and other surviving medieval documents found in our time.

I also felt a little bias on the part of the writer, as he portrayed one queen as good and the other as inherently bad.  While there are sources that would prove just the opposite.  But there has to be a good and a bad hero in every story so that we always feel personally touched in the events.  And this book was like that, I was almost present in the throne halls, on the battlefield, I mourned with the queens at the battle losses, I cried with them at the death of their husbands and children.

It was the best and most interesting historical nonfiction of all I have read so far.  I have come to know a world and an age that has been unknown to me so far, a bloody and chaotic era in French history that was still the starting point of current French and European history.  The two queens were pragmatic and ruthless, yet we feel that romance, love of family and nation were also present in their lives.  For virtually half a century, they ruled much of the continent, yet their lives were erased from the pages of the history books by jealous descendants.

There are a lot of events and characters in the book, no pages, no sentences that would be a little boring.  We always believe that the present is the most tortuous, the most interesting, and then we realize that there were times when the lives and destinies of peoples and nations were in constant turmoil.

Thanks to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for the opportunity to read this book before it is officially published.