BOOK REVIEW: The Kiss of the Concubine by Judith Arnopp

Blurb:

28th January 1547.

It is almost midnight and the cream of the English nobility hold their breath as King Henry VIII prepares to face his God. As the royal physicians wring their hands and Archbishop Cranmer gallops through the frigid night, two dispossessed princesses pray for their father’s soul and a boy, soon to be king, snivels into his velvet sleeve. 

Time slows, and dread settles around the royal bed, the candles dip and something stirs in the darkness … something, or someone, who has come to tell the king it is time to pay his dues. 

The Kiss of the Concubine is the story of Anne Boleyn, second of Henry VIII’s queens. 

My Review:

“The Kiss of the Concubine” by Judith Arnopp was an outstanding read! I absolutely love anything that has to do with Anne Boleyn, and this was definitely right at the top of the list of books I’ve read about her life. I love that the focus was on the positive side of Anne Boleyn.  A lot of books focus  on her ambition, and make her out to be some evil woman, who purposefully went after King Henry VIII with the goal of becoming queen, and that she never loved him, just wanted the crown. This novel gives reader another view of Anne Boleyn. It shows her as a young woman who fell very much in love with King Henry VIII, and although she felt guilty because of what was happening to the king’s wife, Catherine of Aragon, she also was so in love with the king that she really wanted to be with him as his wife. She refused to be his mistress, because she did not want to end up like her sister, who was set aside and forgotten as soon as she became pregnant with the king’s child.

This novel was an easy read, really smooth flowing and interesting. You would think that I would get bored of reading books about Anne Boleyn, but every book about her is different and interesting in its own way. I always learn something new about her life, or get a different look at what she may have been thinking or what she may have gone through.

I would definitely recommend this novel to any historical fiction lovers, especially those who are as obsessed with Tudor history as I am!

I give this novel a FIVE out of FIVE stars!

BUY THIS NOVEL HERE!

BLOG TOUR: Under These Restless Skies by Lissa Bryan

Under These Restless Skies 
By 
Lissa Bryan 

Published by The Writers Coffee Shop

Available from Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, and TWCS

Summary: 

Will Somers has always thought himself unlovable. When he encounters a creature of myth and magic, he seizes the chance to finally have a wife and family of his own. Emma is a selkie—one of the immortal fae-folk of the sea—bound to Will by the magic of her kind, and eager to learn about life on land. She has to learn to adapt quickly to human customs, because Will is headed for the court of Henry VIII, to serve as the king’s fool. It’s a glittering, dangerous world, where a careless word can lead to the scaffold and the smallest of gestures is loaded with political implications. Anne Boleyn is charmed by Emma’s naïveté and soothing selkie magic and wants Emma for her own fool. Can Will protect his newfound love from the dangers that lurk in every shadow? Circa regna tonat: around the throne, the thunder rolls.

Author Bio:

Lissa Bryan is an astronaut, renowned Kabuki actress, Olympic pole vault gold medallist, Iron Chef champion, and scientist, who recently discovered the cure for athlete’s foot . . . though only in her head. Real life isn’t so interesting, which is why she spends most of her time writing.  

My Review:

I’m not going to lie, when I first started reading “Under These Restless Skies” by Lissa Bryan, I wasn't that into it. I was having trouble getting past the ‘magical’ elements and the idea of ‘selkies’. I even put the book down for a few days and started to read something else. I decided to go back to this book and give it another chance, and I’m so glad that I did! It ended up being a fantastic read, and very well researched! I had trouble putting the book down once I started reading it again. Lissa Bryan did a great job at writing a book that a lover of historical fiction can get totally lost in.

Her writing style was interesting, and she did an excellent job with descriptions and imagery, allowing a reader to picture everything that is happening as clearly as if you were there.

As a reader you do have to let go a little, and realize it's not purely historical fiction. There are some magical elements, but they don’t take over the story. They are a part of the story, but not the main part, which I thought was great. I was able to suspend my disbelief while reading, and by the end I found the magical elements of the story endearing. It’s a great story of love, as well as tragedy, the tragedy being Anne Boleyn’s rise and fall. I would recommend this novel to any lover of historical fiction. The author did a great job writing a historical novel, but weaving something out of the ordinary into the story. I’m so glad I gave this novel a second chance!

Even though it took me a couple chapters to get into it, I still give this novel a FIVE out of FIVE stars for how great it ended up being!

Connect with Lissa Bryan on: 

Facebook, Twitter, Blog and Goodreads

Other novels by Lissa Bryan

 

                                                  Ghostwriter                The End of all Things

Short stories by Lissa Bryan

                                             Tales From The End   The Golden Arrow and The Butterfly

 Coming soon The Land of the Shadow 

INTERVIEW & GUEST POST: Under These Restless skies by Lissa Bryan

Interview with Lissa Bryan, author of Under These Restless Skies

1 – You started by writing fanfiction. How important was this for your writing career? How has it influenced your books and writing?

I wouldn’t be a published author today if it wasn’t for fanfiction, and so it’s made a profound difference in my life and career.

I have always written stories in my head, sometimes taking books and movies and re-writing them to have an ending I liked better, or sending the characters off on new adventures. I had no idea other people did this until I discovered fanfiction. I decided to write out some of the stories that had lingered in my mind over the years. One of them became popular and brought me to the attention of my publisher. They approached me and asked me if I’d be interested in writing a novel.

Without the support and kindness of the fanfiction community, I couldn’t have done this. It was a great place to begin writing, because the encouragement and enthusiastic support gave me the courage to try new things.

2 – Under These Restless Skies is your third book. How did you come up with the idea of “Tudors meet selkies”?

I had explored the selkie myth in one of my fanfiction stories, and I enjoyed it so much, I wanted to try it again, but with a few new twists.

There is an old Celtic fairy tale called “The Selkie Wife,” in which a man kidnaps a selkie bride to raise his children. It’s a very sad story, and it sparked my imagination.  I wanted to re-write it to have a happy ending, but I didn’t want to set it in the modern day. Tudor history has always fascinated me, and so I decided to set it during that time period.

My fanfiction story covered the reign of “Bloody” Mary Tudor. I decided my novel would be set earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII.

3- What was your research process for Tudors and Selkies?

There isn’t much available on selkies, so I took what I could find and built my own legend around them. Selkies were shape-shifters who could assume the form of a seal by slipping into magical piece of fur. If it was stolen from them, they would be bound to whomever took it until it was willingly returned. They could also be summoned by shedding seven tears into the sea. They were said to be beautiful in their human form, gentle-hearted, and playful. I took those characteristics and added a little magic to come up with Emma, the heroine of Under These Restless Skies. Will, the hero, steals her pelt, but she ends up stealing his heart.

As I mentioned before, I’ve always been fascinated by the Tudor era, and I’ve read countless books on Henry VIII and his wives. But despite my basic familiarity, the book was research-intensive, which is why this book took me a year to write. If I was writing a dinner scene, I wanted to make sure every food item I described was correct, and at one point, I even ended up going to NASA to find out the phase of the moon on a certain date. But it was a lot of fun and I ended up learning so much more about the time period.

3 – Why Anne Boleyn and not another one of Henry VIII’s wives?

Anne Boleyn is one of the most slandered and misunderstood women in history. She was also one of the most important women in history, because without her, the English Reformation would not have happened as it did.

Henry’s subsequent wives will be covered in the sequel, which I’m going to start writing in the next couple of months.

4 – Your books are very different from each other, but all of them have a paranormal element. Why is that?

Paranormal storylines interest me because I like to explore possibilities and impossibilities. I’m always asking the question, “What if…?” What if the most unexpected thing happened? How would people react to it? How would their lives change? Who would they become?

Guest Post by Lissa Bryan

I’ve been writing stories for about three years now, and I’m sort

of a genre-hopper. I’ve done everything from sci-fi to Gothic romance. I guess the best way to put it is that I like to explore possibilities as a writer, and there’s just too many to confine myself to one genre.

Decades ago, I read Margaret George’s magnificent Autobiography of King Henry VIII. One of the characters is Will Somers, the king’s jester. He’s not a main character in the novel, but the real Will seems to have been very important to the king, more of the king’s confidant than a comedian. Over the years, I’ve wondered what Will must have thought watching the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, and all the wives that came after her.

For my third novel, I decided to write Will’s story. We don’t know much about the life of the real Will Somers, except that he was likely born to a farming family in Shropshire, and likely had scoliosis, which twisted his back and made him walk with a limp. There’s no record he ever married. At the time, people with physical imperfections would have a difficult time finding a spouse. Will is an unusual choice for a romantic hero, but I like a challenge.

I’ve already written an online story set in the Tudor era, based on the old Celtic fairy tale, “The Selkie Wife.” Selkies have fascinated me since I heard first heard that terribly sad old story, and I wanted to write a version of it that had a happy ending. But even after I completed that story, I knew I wasn’t done writing about selkies. The legends still captivated my imagination.

 Unlike the aggressive supernatural characters like vampires and werewolves that have been explored so much in fiction, selkies are gentle creatures whose powers stem from love. In the old legends, they could be summoned by a lonely maiden shedding seven tears into the sea. In their human form, they were beautiful and warm-hearted, though they could be fierce protectors of the weak. The women made excellent wives and mothers, which was why the men in the old legends wanted to capture them.

I wondered what it would be like if Will Somers, rejected all his life because of his back, suddenly encountered a chance to have a wife of his own? What would happen if an innocent, soft-hearted creature like a selkie was suddenly brought into the glittering, cutthroat court of Henry VIII? That’s how Will and Emma came into being in my imagination.

Aside from the paranormal elements, I wanted to try to be as accurate as possible with the story of King Henry and Anne Boleyn. Anne is such a maligned figure, especially since much of what we “know” about her comes from the reports of her enemies. Writing this book required a lot of research, but it was a lot of fun. I’m starting work on the sequel in a few months, and I can’t wait to see where that story takes me.

Click here to purchase Under These Restless Skies!

INTERVIEW with Brandy Purdy, Author of "The Boleyn Bride"

Questions for Brandy Purdy – The Boleyn Bride – Historical Fiction Obsession

How did you become a writer? What was your journey like?

Well, I’d always been a reader, and I suppose it had always been in the back of my mind that I might become a writer someday, but it wasn’t until my mother died ten years ago that I actually started to become one. Books have always been the one constant in my life and when they fail me I know I am in serious trouble. After my mother died I kept picking up books and putting them down, I couldn’t take anything in, then I picked up a book about royal scandals, one of those books written in kind of a comic, trashy tabloid style and opened it at random and found myself reading the story of Edward II’s grand passion, Piers Gaveston. Something in that story spoke to me, and I started reading everything I could find about Gaveston, and became intrigued by all the rumors about him yet how few facts are known about him. I decided to try writing a novel, The Confession of Piers Gaveston; I wanted to write from the viewpoint of an unreliable narrator, to tell the kind of story where the reader might wonder if this person was sitting in front of them telling this story if they would believe it or not. No one in my life really believed I could do it, but it was something to occupy me and help me through my grief. I finished the book and after about a dozen or so query letters was signed to a literary agency but, as an unpublished nobody from nowhere with no college education or other degrees or experience that the agent thought would help paint a better picture of me, I was basically at the bottom of the barrel. In the meantime I moved on to another fascinating character from history, Lady Rochford, who is remembered today for accusing her husband, George Boleyn, of incest with his sister Anne, and wrote my second novel, which was then called Vengeance Is Mine. Finally I decided to gamble on myself and self-published both books, a few months later I had a new agent and Kensington had bought the rights to my second novel and changed the title to The Boleyn Wife,  and The Tudor Throne, The Queen’s Pleasure, The Queen’s Rivals, and The Boleyn Bride followed. It’s been an interesting journey, I’ve loved writing and researching the books, and the challenge of finding new and different ways to tell these oft-told stories, the only thing I regret is not having the close, personal support system many other writers are very fortunate to have. I started out gambling on myself because no one else would, and in a strictly personal sense, I still am.

Any particular thing or event draw you write to historical fiction?

Sometimes a certain person will just “speak” to me in a way that makes me feel compelled to learn more and perhaps tell their story.  I never know when that is going to happen.

How did the Tudor Era inspire you?

I’ve always been fascinated with the Tudor era ever since I was a little girl about nine or ten years old and I bought a book of ghost stories that had a chapter about Anne Boleyn’s ghost haunting the Tower of London. To be honest, I didn’t originally plan to write so many Tudor novels, I’m interested in many historical characters and eras, but I’m very glad I was able to write about some of the characters who particularly intrigued me like Lady Rochford and Amy Robsart.

What kind of research is involved in your process?

I read a great deal and take notes and I am very visual I always look at lots of pictures. I like to be surrounded by pictures when I am writing.  I see the story playing out like a movie in my mind, sometimes in whole scenes, sometimes in fragments, sometimes in full color with crisp, clear images, sometimes like an old silent movie in dire need of restoration,  and it’s my job to try to turn those pictures into words, to convey the actors emotions, and get it all down on paper, hopefully in a way that my readers will enjoy.

What inspired you to share Elizabeth Boleyn’s story?

I didn’t really want to write another novel about someone who had already been the subject of dozens of books, and while I was sitting thinking about it I realized how absent Elizabeth Boleyn was from the story of her more famous daughters. I did some research and it confirmed that very few facts about her have come down to us, and that absence intrigued me. It’s actually, in some ways, a book about absence, it’s the story of a woman who is both emotionally and physically absent from her children’s lives until they become grown up and a little more interesting to her, but, by then, it’s too late. It’s also a story about mistakes, missed opportunities, regrets, and choices made for all the wrong reasons.

Out of all your books, which character has been your favorite to bring to life?

That is a very hard question. It’s a tie between three: Piers Gaveston was in a sense my knight in shining armor, writing his story saved me and also showed me that I could be a writer; Lady Rochford was both fun and fascinating, I loved the challenge of writing from the viewpoint of a madwoman, and one that hated Anne Boleyn, who is actually one of the women in history I admire most; and Amy Robsart’s was such a sad and neglected life, she’s been largely reduced to just a name on a page, so many focus on the glamour and romance of her husband’s ambitious dalliance with Queen Elizabeth I, and even when I was a little girl just becoming immersed in the Tudor saga I thought it was so unfair that Amy’s voice was lost, and I remember thinking if I ever wrote a novel when I grew up I wanted to give her back her voice, to let her be the star of the story for once.

Are there any authors you admire or any must-read books you’d like to recommend?

Anya Seton is my favorite historical fiction author, I’ve read all her books. Green Darkness is my favorite, it was one of the first adult novels I ever read, and I loved the way it used the reincarnation theme to weave together the modern and historical stories. I still try to reread it every few years when I can, next time I get the chance I hope to review it on my blog.

If you could go back in time, what place would you visit?

Well, I have a toothache now, so I don’t think I’d like to visit anywhere without modern dentistry so that kind of limits my choices. But, that’s not a very good answer, so,  if I could be a noblewoman and have the fabulous clothes and indulge my love of jewelry, and have my hair styled by Leonard, I’d kind of like to pay a visit to 18^th century France during the time of Marie Antoinette, before the Revolution, when panniered skirts were at their widest and powdered hair was at its highest,  and maybe pay a call on Count Fersen; I’d like to see for myself if he looked anything like Tyrone Power in the movie. Anyone who knows how shy I really am will know I’m joking:-)

Are you working on anything currently?

I am, something very special, but I can’t say what it is right now, only that it’s not another Tudor novel, and if all goes well I hope to have a big surprise for my readers in time for next Christmas.

Do you have any advice for aspiring historical fiction writers?

There’s really nothing I can say that hasn’t been said countless times before. Keep writing, keep submitting, believe in yourself even when no one else does, and always remember that books are like candy, not everyone likes the same kinds and flavors, and keep repeating that to yourself when the bad reviews come. I know better than anyone all that is easy to say but sometimes very hard to do. I wish you all the best of luck.


"The Boleyn Bride" is due to come out February 25th 2014! Preorder it at amazon now!

The Boleyn Bride by Brandy Purdy

Blurb:

From carefree young woman to disillusioned bride, the dazzling lady who would become mother and grandmother to two of history's most infamous queens, has a fascinating story all her own. . .

At sixteen, Elizabeth Howard envisions a glorious life for herself as lady-in-waiting to the future queen, Catherine of Aragon. But when she is forced to marry Thomas Boleyn, a wealthy commoner, Elizabeth is left to stagnate in the countryside while her detested husband pursues his ambitions. There, she raises golden girl Mary, moody George, and ugly duckling Anne—while staving off boredom with a string of admirers. Until Henry VIII

takes the throne. . .

When Thomas finally brings his highborn wife to London, Elizabeth indulges in lavish diversions and dalliances—and catches the lusty king's eye. But those who enjoy Henry's fickle favor must also guard against his wrath. For while her husband's machinations bring Elizabeth and her children to the pinnacle of power, the distance to the scaffold is but a short one—and the Boleyn family's fortune may be turning. . .

Praise for the novels of Brandy Purdy

"Recommended for readers who can't get enough of the Tudors and have devoured all of Philippa Gregory's books." —Library Journal on The Boleyn Wife

"Purdy wonderfully reimagines the behind-the-scenes lives of the two sisters." —Historical Novel Reviews on The Tudor Throne

My Review:

“The Boleyn Bride” by Brandy Purdy was right up my alley when it comes to reading and reviewing. I read every book I can get my hands on that deals with Anne Boleyn or King Henry VIII! Ms. Purdy did not disappoint. Her writing style was fluid and descriptive, and it keeps the reader interested through the entire novel. I loved reading the author's perspective on what Anne Boleyn’s mother, Elizabeth Howard, was like during her life. In all of the books I’ve read about Anne, there has been barely a mention of her mother, since very little is known about her. Even though the author definitely used some creative license as to what she was really like, it was still interesting to read about what type of person she MIGHT have been.

While I definitely enjoyed reading the book, I would have enjoyed it more if it had been more about Anne Boleyn’s mother, Elizabeth Howard, and less about Anne’s rise and fall. I felt like the book was mostly Elizabeth (Anne's mother) telling the story of Anne and her brother George’s life, and less about what HER life was like. Occasionally she would narrate what was going on in her life, but it mostly dealt with her multitude of lovers! Also, there were a few historical inaccuracies that threw me off, but nothing more than what any other historical fiction writer throws in.

All in all I really enjoyed reading this novel. The time period this novel takes place in interests me more than any other era. Any lover of historical fiction, especially the Tudor era, will love this novel. I would definitely recommend it.

I give "The Boleyn Bride" a 4 out of 5 stars!

"The Boleyn Bride" will be available for purchase in February 2014!