Title: Isabella: Braveheart of France
Author: Colin Falconer
Publication Date: April 21, 2015 (Kindle Unlimited Edition) (Famous Women series)
My Grade: C
It’s hard to write this review because it almost seems like I can’t put into words what I found wrong about this book. The general story is good, but then its a story brought from real life. The things wrong are found in other elements.
This story feels self Published in that it seems unedited. The tenses shift, and the phrasing doesn’t flow well. At first I thought perhaps it was written for a younger audience, but some of the language disagrees with that theory.
It also turns Roger Mortimer into a pedophile, openly desiring Isabella since she was 12 years old. Edward the II sounds like a madman, and whether he was or not we really don’t get to know him at all except as Isabella points out the awkward moments in their relationship. Piers Gaveston has a large role but still we know nothing really about him except he was pretty, and Edward liked him a lot. In fact there isn’t a lot of character development at all. Isabella is the most developed, as one would hope from the sole POV character, but considering how big a role some of these characters play, I would have expected to know more about them.
It also has some time jumps, as the novel is less than 300 pages and it covers 17 years of her life. It doesn’t even really cover her years as Queen Regent, ending with Edward’s death.
Still, I have read much worse, and it seems for the most part not to take too many literary licence with the history, though I am not knowledgeable enough to really take on that element of it. I give it a C, because It didn’t make me want to throw it out the window, but it didn’t enthrall me either. Perhaps, if given a proper editor, it could improved upon.
Sokorra Lewis 