nadia's Reviews (587)

I first read this book in 2013. I remember enjoying it but finding it quite hard to get into. 9 years later, older, and wiser, I thought I'd have a much easier time with it, but I was surprised by how hard I found it to follow passages of dialogue, the characters and their relationships and motivations, and to fully grasp why or how certain things had come to pass.

However, on the whole, I still found this book intriguing, captivating, and tense at times. I love reading about behind-the-scenes political machinations and strategy, and I've always been a fan of the Tudor period. The writing was excellent, though a few times too many on the ambiguous side, at least for me.

This is one of those books that was a real challenge but I welcomed it and I look forward to revisiting Bring Up The Bodies.

I'm surprised by how much I enjoyed this reread! After I found Wolf Hall more a struggle to get into than I remembered, this one was a lot easier. And when I dug up an old blog post I wrote back in 2014 (over 8 years ago), I had the same experience:

Having gone through this twice, I reckon the writing, while still excellent, is, on the whole, more direct in this one!

There will still parts where I had to reread paragraphs a few times to grasp the meaning, and some aspects did some rather dull, but those were few and far in between.

Keeping track of who's who was still relatively difficult on the whole, especially without a paper copy to easily flick back and forth, but having reread Wolf Half very recently definitely helped!

Finally I'm ready to for The Mirror & the Light!

P.S. Review from 2013 was 4⭐️ ; I probably would have given it 4.25 if StoryGraph had existed!

P.P.S. I'm currently enjoying watching the BBC adaptation of the two books with some friends. It's really good!