Review: Introduction to Cecylee
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 2, 2014
The Thwarted Queen series begins with The Bride Price, which is more of a novella and not much of a stand-alone novel. In this introduction to Cecylee - don't call her Cecily - we see her betrothed to the young Duke of York.The writing was detailed in descriptions but a little disjointed when it came to dialog. Sometimes I had to reread a few lines to determine who was saying what or what exactly they were trying to say. Interesting historical tidbits were thrown in, and it is clear that the author has done her research. However, she also tries to introduce everyone Cecylee is related to in this short story, which was a little much for me. I think it would be very overwhelming to someone with no prior knowledge of the Neville family.I'm treating this as opening chapters more than it's own story, so I will reserve further judgement for later.Review of Thwarted Queen as a whole:First to clear up some confusion - at least it confused me. Thwarted Queen is available as one continuous story by that name or in segments as follows: The Bride Price (Thwarted Queen, #1), One Seed Sown (Thwarted Queen, #2), The Gilded Cage (Thwarted Queen, #3), and Two Murders Reaped (Thwarted Queen, #4). On Kindle, they are available all together as Thwarted Queen or individually. It is really all one book with continuous chapters, though the point of view of the storytelling jumps from 1st person to 3rd person and back again in the separate sections.Basically, Haggard asks the question "What if everything said about Edward IV was true?" Though the story in The Bride Price begins long before Edward's birth, that is the premise of this series. What if the pious Duchess of York truly did give in to temptation in her youth and bore her husband an illegitimate heir? What if the womanizing Edward with his peasant roots really did enter a bigamous marriage because he was arrogant enough to believe he could get away with it? What if the sons of Edward and "the Serpent" Elizabeth Woodville were killed in order to remove the Woodville influence with the blessing of their grandmother? All good questions answered in this series.While I preferred the characterization of Cecily in Anne Easter Smith's Queen By Right, this was an interesting take on her story as well. It is not as well-written and the characters did not inspire my sympathy, but it did look at things from a new angle. Besides the switching point of view issue, Haggard seems to want to include every Wars of the Roses era name into the mix, even if only for a moment, and it was just too much name dropping to keep track of.I was anxious to read this and it didn't quite meet my expectations, but it was a good first effort by this author.