The Royal Circle Series by Katherine Longshore- Series Thoughts

The Royal Circle series is collection of companion novels each about a different girl in the Tudor age- a YA version of Phillipa Gregory's work if you will. Each main character is a real person- if fact, everyone's a real historical figure with the biggest connection between the each book being that they all follow Howards- Catherine Howard in the first book (though her rather dull servant girl Kitty narrates), Anne Boleyn in the second book, and Mary Fitzroy nee Howard in the third.

This series is very overwrought, and I can see why it's mostly out of print in America- though maybe not in the UK? I see a lot of British reviewers of this series on Goodreads. Really, the only book of this series that's all you need to read to get a feel of Katherine Longshore's writing is Gilt, as neither her characters nor her writing really progress the way you'd expect it to. Her character are all interchangeable and her writing is this bizarre mix of Old English and modern slang. 

Do I have a favorite character? Nope. I mean, in real life I'm kind of partial to Anne Boleyn, but in this series she wasn't really Anne Boleyn so I didn't really care about her.

What about favorite book? I suppose I like both Tarnish and Brazen better than Gilt at any rate, but I can't really pick a favorite. I guess I'll go with Brazen since it was the best written and most political of all her books.

I have kind of a nostalgic attachment to Gilt, though. It was, after all, the second book I reviewed on this blog and that means something to me. All in all though, I doubt I'll recommend these books to anyone, unless a person I know really loved The Luxe and is all about the Tudors. I will probably never reread any of these books. 

Gilt: 4.5-5 out of 10
Tarnish: 5 out of 10
Brazen: 5 out of 10

Overall Series Rating: 5 out of 10

Brazen by Katherine Longshore Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Love isn't making others into the people we imagine they should be. It's about letting people be themselves”- Brazen, Katherine Longshore

Mary Howard has always lived in the shadow of her powerful family. But when she’s married off to Henry Fitzroy, King Henry VIII’s illegitimate son, she rockets into the Tudor court’s inner circle. Mary and “Fitz” join a tight clique of rebels who test the boundaries of court’s strict rules with their games, dares, and flirtations. The more Mary gets to know Fitz, the harder she falls for him, but is forbidden from seeing him alone. The rules of court were made to be pushed…but pushing them too far means certain death. Is true love worth dying for?

When I said I was going to be tying up some loose ends in November, I didn't think I would be going this far back. I've been putting off this book since MARCH for God's sake. But I've been in the mood for a little historical fiction lately despite the fact that everything I pick up seems to be a mystery and this was the only available book on my shelf (besides The Revolution of Marina M, but I'm saving that one for December). I mean, the book's over 500 pages and Tarnish kind of put me off wanting to go anywhere near this series for a while.

But this is one of the few series I actually wanted to get to this year from start to finish, so better late then never, right? 

Brazen is probably the best written of all the Royal Circle books, which really isn't saying anything at all. Longshore still writes in that annoying half old English-half modern English way that really takes you out of Tudor England and puts you in, I don't know, a suburban high school. I'm also impressed with her ability to both overwrite and underwrite at the same time- that takes talent. She writes paragraphs that look pretty and sound very dramatic, but in reality end up meaning very little. Reading this book at times is like eating a piece of cake that's 80% frosting and 20% cake.

In Longshore's defense though, she does focus more on pure politics than she did in any of her other books. I liked those parts, even if I did think she had a tendency to overdramaticize things. Also, all of her heroines are different people and yet they all sound the same. Especially in the case of Tarnish and Brazen. I could not tell Anne in Tarnish from Mary in Brazen. They both have that strong, female historical fiction character thing going, and likely believe things that neither the real Anne Boleyn nor the real Mary Fitzroy probably actually gave much thought to. I think my main problem with Longshore's work is I think she romanticizes her subjects too much. She wants us to like them so badly, but in the end they just come across as, again, generic historical fiction females.

I also took a lot of issue with the dialogue. It's so overwrought, with every word laden with meaning that it drives me crazy. Especially in Anne and Mary's exchanges.

I get that Longshore wants to evoke The Tudors. I mean, when these books came out that show was one of the biggest things on TV, Phillipa Gregory was as big of a name here as she was in England, people couldn't get enough of 16th century England. Of course, The Tudors was a fairly ridiculous show and one I was never that into myself, but I suppose she's successful somewhat in invoking the not-so-historically based intrigue of the show. I'm happy I finally finished the Royal Circle series. I doubt I'll ever go back to this series, but it's something that needed to be done before the end of the year. I'll put up my Series Thoughts soon.

5 out of 10

Tarnish by Katherine Longshore Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“I will no longer be judged by the standards of others. I will judge myself. I will not live by someone else's rules. I will make my own.”- Tarnish, Katherine Longshore

Anne Boleyn is the odd girl out. Newly arrived to the court of King Henry VIII, everything about her seems wrong, from her clothes to her manners to her witty but sharp tongue. So when the dashing poet Thomas Wyatt offers to coach her on how to shine at court—and to convince the whole court they’re lovers—she accepts. Before long, Anne’s popularity has soared, and even the charismatic and irresistible king takes notice. More than popularity, Anne wants a voice—but she also wants love. What began as a game becomes high stakes as Anne finds herself forced to make an impossible choice between her heart’s desire and the chance to make history. 

I actually like the covers of these books. I like the way they look on the shelf together too. But as a whole, I don't think I really like the books themselves.

I wasn't expecting to read this book next. But I didn't want to start my Valentine's Day book until it was closer to actual Valentine's Day so I pulled this book off my TBR stack and figured it would be a quick read. I ended up having to finish it at 10 o'clock at night because I didn't want to carry reading it into Monday. This book was not the quick read Gilt was for me. Frankly this book could have been cut down at least 100 pages and still would have made a cohesive narrative. But I am seeing some writing issues that I can't write off as rookie mistakes any more. I can tell that Longshore has a problem with repetition. The overused sheep metaphor was used a lot, as well as the whole idea of being trapped and the amount of times the word tarnish (or a form of the word) appeared made me want to take a shot every time it showed up. I also noticed a big problem with Longshore's dialogue, and that is that she'll have some really authentic-sounding dialogue, and it really fits in well with the time period and then all of sudden modern words and phrases will jarringly appear. I noticed it in Gilt, but dismissed it as an easy fix. The fix never happened, so now I have to talk about it. Bad, Longshore, bad.

Anne was another big problem. One Goodreads reviewer commented that it seemed like Anne had been declawed, and that is true. The Anne in this novel seemed like some feminist, too modern for the time she grew up in. That is false, and frankly insulting to the real Anne Boleyn, who was so much more than that. I wish this book had portrayed her as the ruthless social climber she probably was instead of foisting her into this role of a whiny girl who just wanted love and especially Daddy's love. She would never have truly fallen for a poet, she was more pragmatic than that. She aimed far higher than that. I also snorted with laughter at her whole "Mary (as in Henry's daughter Mary) will be queen" speech. She hated her stepdaughter, and the only reason why she would have been in favor of a queen was because of her own daughter. I think I also laughed because the whole speech was about how women might be better leaders than men, but then you realize she's arguing for a woman who ordered the death of hundreds of Protestants at the stake and placed her own half sister (Anne's daughter, nonetheless) under house arrest, earning the nickname Bloody Mary. I guess women aren't better leaders after all. I was also disappointed that a key part of her personality was left out and that was her Protestantism. Anne was a huge champion of Erasmus, and often gave her lady's maids his pamphlets or work to read.

I noticed that whenever Longshore wants to show that so and so is a bad guy she overdoes it, like with James Butler. Yeah, he probably wasn't a peach, but she way over did it. His sexism was laughable because it was so over the top. Also, the fat and undesirable potential fiance? Someone's read Catherine Called Birdy, I see. I also didn't really care about Thomas Wyatt, and all the romantic scenes with him just made this book drag. I wanted more court intrigue, not more romance for a couple that didn't work out. And then there was Anne's heel-face love for Henry. She literally went from being in lurve with Wyatt to falling hard for the king out of nowhere. Both Gilt and Tarnish lagged horribly in the middle, and I think it's because a whole lotta nothing happened. Which normally, I'm fine with, but I have to actually give a damn about the characters and the nothing that fills those pages can't be romance, because romance is even more boring than no plot at all. 

So what do I like? As much as I didn't like Anne, I liked that she was in fact the narrator and not some side character like in Gilt. It made the story feel more centralized. I liked Longshore's author note at the end. As I mentioned in my Gilt review, it is nice to see Henry VIII portrayed the way he is in these books. I liked George, and I liked their sibling relationship, even if it isn't entirely accurate. George and Wyatt's friends were great, and they reminded me of the Life or Death Brigade from the Gilmore Girls, which I loved. And of course, the costume porn was great, even if I did get annoyed by Anne's critique of the ceruse, especially the medical effects of it. It's unlikely that Anne would know that the make-up caused women's hair and teeth to fall out, especially since this is a pre-Enlightenment society when medicine was very, very primital. 

I'm still going to read Brazen, mostly because, and I have to hand it to Longshore, these books are hella addictive. I also think she has interesting ideas that lack in execution. Once I've finished Brazen, which I already ordered, I'll write my final thoughts on the series, but I feel like right now I'm continuing with the series because I have to, not because I want to.

5 out of 10

Gilt by Katherine Longshore Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Because it is human nature to believe the first story heard, and not its rebuttal.”- Gilt, Katherine Longshore

In the court of King Henry VIII, nothing is free--
and love comes at the highest price of all. 

When Kitty Tylney's best friend, Catherine Howard, worms her way into King Henry VIII's heart and brings Kitty to court, she's thrust into a world filled with fabulous gowns, sparkling jewels, and elegant parties. No longer stuck in Cat's shadow, Kitty's now caught between two men--the object of her affection and the object of her desire. But court is also full of secrets, lies, and sordid affairs, and as Kitty witnesses Cat's meteoric rise and fall as queen, she must figure out how to keep being a good friend when the price of telling the truth could literally be her head.

My AP Euro teacher kicked off our unit on the English Reformation with a story about Henry VIII. At the time, pants came in two pieces, and in the middle, holding it all together, would be a codpiece. Apparently, Henry VIII ordered that no courtier was allowed to have a bigger codpiece than his own. That story says a lot about Henry VIII, who is likely the most famous king England ever had.

Apart from a phase in 7th grade where I idolized Elizabeth I, I can't say the Tudors have ever really captured my attention. Nowadays, my interest lies in the Edwardian times, the Roaring Twenties, and Russia (anywhere/anytime Russia), but I still have a small nostalgia-bred affection for the Tudors, so I was interested in picking this book up. It is part of a loose threesome of companion novels, all taking place during the reign of Henry VIII, and this is the least elusive of the three. When I picked it up, I was in the right place to read something like this- Rumors had exceeded my expectations, and that always puts me in a good mood to start a new novel from an author I am unfamiliar with, especially a YA author, since they usually aren't critically acclaimed like adult authors usually are (no hate, just the truth). Right away, though, my main problem appeared. Kitty. I didn't like her as a narrator very much. Normally, I like it when a side character is the narrator, and that tactic is typically used for character studies, which I love. But Longshore gave Kitty an actual storyline and too much personality to make her a good character study-esque narrator. I mean, Truman Capote didn't insert 100 pages of himself doing other things that had nothing to do with Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Because Holly Golightly is the main character, regardless of who the narrator is, just like Catherine Howard should be the main character, not Kitty. I found myself skipping most of her interactions with William and even Edmund just to get to the story I was really interested in, the story of Catherine Howard. There was a lot of background stuff that made the first 150-200 pages a super quick read. 

Quite a lot of the parts with Kitty were super contrived, especially when she encounters Thomas Culpeper raping a peasant woman. It was extremely unlikely she would have encountered this in the first place, and now many historians believe that the rapist was actually Culpeper's older brother, who was also named Thomas (please tell me I'm not the only one who finds that funny). I felt as if Kitty was also really inconsistent as a character, since she goes from being really angry at Cat and hating her to getting mad when others insinuated that Cat's downfall was her fault. There were a few other unnecessary bits with Kitty that also distracted from the story, and in my opinion she should have been scrapped all together. 

I came close to giving this book a solid 5/10 a few times, because I liked the court intrigue and the pretty dresses and especially the parts that dealt with Catherine Howard's downfall, but the thing that mostly held me back was Kitty. As soon as something interesting would happen, a few scenes later we were back in Kitty's dull, dull world. I did like some things, like the more sympathetic view of Henry VIII, something that usually isn't seen in Tudor-era literature, and that Catherine Howard was shown as someone who deserved what she got. Longshore definitely did her homework, also evidenced by her author's note in the back, and most of the problems I saw with her writing were common debut errors that are usually smoothed out by the sophomore novel. The only serious error I saw was, again, the inconsistency of Kitty's voice and her character as a whole. I will still read Tarnish, when I can track down a paper copy of it at least, and probably Brazen after that. Hopefully I will like both more than Gilt.

4.5-5 out of 10