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Cecily: An epic feminist retelling of the War of the Roses

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Cecily despises unequal marriages and feels nothing but scorn when Jacquetta, the widow of the duke of Bedford, marries the pretty golden boy Woodville; a marriage to which the groom can only bring his good looks. It isn't anti-men, in fact her relationship and alliance with her husband is one of the strongest themes in the book. And I need everyone to read this book so that we can talk endlessly about Cecily and the extraordinary life she lived - or rather, created for herself. While not every moment is a success, and certainly Cecily feels the pain of her losses deeply, she is conniving, intelligent and always preparing her next move in the war of politics. I don’t think ‘purple prose’ can be avoided if you want to create an authentic atmosphere (you’ve surely noticed how overblown the literature and even normal speech of that time was in terms of vocabulary and adjectives when compared to ours) - minimalism and crispness wasn’t a thing in at that time.

Nervous because while I read a lot of historical fiction set in late medieval England, very rarely do I find that’s actually a decent read and the fact that the Wars of the Roses is often depicted in fiction with a very rigid and partisan Ricardian view. And from time to time the action comes to Cecily, or she travels to it - and these visitations offer some of the most vivid, moving, heartrending, uplifting or downright triumphant moments in a mesmerizing book. While picturing Cecily in my mind, I could hear her voice and imagine her life-like facial expressions and mannerisms as they were familiar to a 21st century ready… but what I saw was still a medieval woman and not one in a power-suit. There are times when one may feel a little distant from the 'action', which perhaps is only to be expected when one is reading a woman's point of view on what is very much a politics-and-battles era of 'traditional' history (as opposed to 'herstory'), with some major incidents related through messenger or letter, when Cecily herself wasn't/couldn't be present. Cecylia pióra Annie Garthwaite niewiele ma wspólnego z Cecylią, którą wprowadził do literatury Szekspir w „Królu Ryszardzie III”, i dobrze!She and her husband, Richard, the third Duke of York are a well-matched pair, equal partners in love, politics and war. There is a common trope to view York as the man driven by nobility and what is “right” who can’t survive in a court of snakes (similar to “Good Duke Humphrey” in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part 2 or Ned Stark in A Game of Thrones), but I have never been convinced by it and Garthwaite doesn’t sell it here either. A fast paced retelling of the war of the roses with Cecily Duchess of York as its formidable protagonist. Cecily and her husband's love, and their understanding of each other, are so convincing that you almost hope the book will end before the inevitable. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Cecily Neville was one of the most intelligent women of her generation, driven by ambition and by the awareness of her status among the nobles. She thinks of her brother outwitting the queen’s army not a month ago at Blore Heath, first to enter the streets at St. Velvet on velvet… It seems the scents of an Italian summer are trapped in its folds, or that, by some magic, the tiny marguerites patterned in its alternating depths carry the perfume of true flowers.Again, it is Cecily who points out the obvious that both of York’s heirs must not stay with Richard. She sits halfway between modern-medieval in all things: characterisation, prose, plot arcs etc so we don’t end up with an awkward pastiche that reads like a bodice-ripper.

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