Sancha Of Aragon ? Is This A Joke?
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I was looking forward to reading this book but I struggled to get halfway through. It is supposed to be a fictional account of Sancha`s marriage to Joffre Borgia. Sancha is portrayed as a gentle, innocent victim trapped by marriage within a brutal, evil, treacherous family.
Although very little is actually known of Sancha Of Aragon - for anyone who has read up on the Borgia`s history they will know that this fictionalized story is just too ridicules for words.
Sancha was a very sly, sensuous, worldly woman who seemed to create constant friction within the family - she certainly wasn`t the woman of morals portrayed in this book & Joffre certainly did not stay with her after the pope had died.
It would take far too long to list all of my reasons for finding this book silly and unreadable, but for anyone who knows anything about the politics of the Borgia`s, all I can say is - DON`T BOTHER BUYING THIS, YOU WILL BE VERY DISAPPOINTED.
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Shallow characters, unimaginative story-telling
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I picked up this book on the basis of a lot of positive reviews and have rarely been so underwhelmed, despite the fact that this is a period of history and a set of characters which I find particularly fascinating.
The author is presented with a fantastic readymade story, and somehow fails to make a compelling novel out of. The best part of the book was the prologue, which doesn't even gel with the story in retrospect. The main character is a cardboard cut-out of a modern woman in Renaissance Italy. The author seems unsure who her villains are from one chapter to the next. I'm all in favour of complex characters, but characters whose motivations and behaviour seem to conflict and contradict one another are confused rather than complex. I would be unlikely to read this author again.
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Compelling story
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This book was the first historical fiction book i'd ever read but because of this i have since bough more.
The story was gripping from the start and was at times shokig. I read it at work and while relaying the story to my collegues they were asking "what ARE you reading?!"
I especially enjoyed reading that many of the thing sin the book were in fact reality...i only wish my history classes had been this entertaining!
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Brilliant Borgia Bride
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I am a huge Phillippa Gregory fan, and picked this book up to try a new author in the historical fiction genre, though i wasn't sure if would be particularly interested in Italian history, as i have little knowledge of it but thought i would give it a go. I found the book to be unput-downable, very sensual and interesting from start to finish. As i said, i haven't a great knowledge of Italian History so can't really comment on the historical accuracy, but i did thoroughly enjoy the book. The characters were well developed and diverse, the storyline often unpredictable and at times rather shocking. I would definately recommend this novel.
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borgia boredom
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I'm a bit bemused by the slew of gushing reviews of this novel. I picked it up from a shelf in my hotel in the Naples area last week, hoping for some idle escapism with a little depth.
Instead I found the writing to be clumsy and laden with cliches and stylistic disasters. The research was superficial and selective, gathering up many of the basic facts of the Borgia's story, but overlooking the subtler details, and as a result the novel utterly fails to create a convincing evocation of the 15th century and its mores and norms. The author doesn't seem particularly interested in discovering and revealing the actual motivations of the characters, and insteads interprets the bare facts through a very modern prism. In fact, it reads more like a low-quality novel of the late 20th century dressed in a Renaissance gown.
I doubted on many occasions whether the author had even visited Rome and Naples, and still do. Her research seems to have come mostly from the internet, which is simply not a good source for the Italian Renaissance, and she fails to enter the mindset of the period sufficiently well to create a convincing novel.
A sad waste of an opportunity to write a good novel about a very interesting subject then.
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