Emma: The Twice-Crowned Queen by Isabella Strachan

This is a profoundly frustrating book! The author's to be commended for having done a great amount of research to pull together an array of fascinating characters, violent times and courtly intrigues. Sadly, though, although all the characters and events of epic drama are present and correct the drama itself doesn't come to the party. The author just doesn't have any sense of narrative flow.

Take, for example, the incident of the St. Brice's Day massacre. It's heavily touted within the book as the single most catastrophic incident in the reign of Ethelred the Unready (and, arguably, Saxon England history) but when the moment comes in the narrative you would hardly notice it. A couple of pages afterwards it suddenly dawned on me that the author's references to the event had changed from "would be" to "was."

There are other instances, and plenty more where the narrative flow begins to build and then is lurched out of the way to make room for a short, distracting side issue. It reads and feels very much like reading a chronicler's efforts: "here's the latest installment of the story and while I remember here's a couple more facts."

Sadly, this is a book written by an encyclopedist, not a historian.

-- Steven