There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Yet the intimacy of Elizabeth Woodville’s story is too often overshadowed by the complexities of the times she lived in, and in Gregory’s attempt to get it all in, some depth of character is left out.Ī mixed result in this first of a new series.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. As always Gregory fills out all the dark corners of history and creates a thrilling read, and again creates a portrait of female society that has more power (diamond-hard women who will see their sons and husbands rule at any cost) than is generally acknowledged. When Edward suddenly dies, his brother Richard III steals the rights of the young Prince of Wales and crowns himself King. In the midst of this Elizabeth and Edward have many children, including two boys who become part of the unsolved mystery of the Princes in the Tower. Along the way there are betrayals by those seeking the throne for themselves, more conquests and more enemies made, with France always at their heels. On the advice of her mother and Edward, she gives titles and power to all of her family, a move that makes her allies and enemies in equal measure. It is love at first sight (or maybe lust as the King is a notorious letch, or maybe witchcraft-Elizabeth and her mother dabble in the black arts), and soon she and Edward marry and she ascends the throne as the new Queen of England. Elizabeth Woodville, a Lancastrian widow and famous beauty, stops the King and his retinue on the road to ask that her lands and inheritance be restored to her. A young Yorkist heir claims the crown through a series of battles and becomes Edward IV. Mentally unstable (some say a holy fool), his House of Lancaster is fighting the House of York to maintain a puppet throne. It is 1464 and Henry VI is King of England, but not for long. Gregory’s latest fiction ( The Other Queen, 2008, etc.) moves from the Tudors to their predecessors, the Plantaganets, and their War of the Roses.

The white queen book review