The Queen’s Lover is a really great jaunt into the history of England, France and Spain, with the building of allies, empires and enemies during a time of great tumult and wars fought for honor and kingship.  It is a totally enthralling view of a time and place in history that many of us may have a personal connection to.

Personally, I love the characters that Ms. Bennett portrays. She has made them come alive for me, with their very real feelings and fears for both themselves and their countries.  I found a lot of the historical content to be accurate, verified as I was looking up information on the internet about the real lives of Catherine de Valois, King Charles VI of France, Christine de Pizen, King Henry V of England, and especially Owain Tudor of Wales, whose grandson later became Henry VII, the first of the Tudor Kings of England.  All of this story of the royalty and escapades of medieval Europe takes place in the early 1400s, long before King Henry VII of England ever made a gleam in the eyes of his royal mother.

The book is primarily about Christine de Pizan, a female writer of the period, who became a fixture in the court of France because of an ability with letters and knowledge unheard of at the time. Accompanying de Pizan is a young man who is standing in for the King of England, as the bearer of the dowry gift, in an offer of marriage between His Royal Highness and Catherine 'Capet' de Valois. That young squire is Owain Tudor who, through Christine, meets and falls madly in love with the young girl who will become the Queen of England.

This is a touching story of the reality of war, the reality of pain and hunger and strife in the Middle Ages and it is a glimpse into how difficult life was for even the royals of the time.  You get to see the truth about the Duke of Burgundy, Queen Isabeau, King Charles V and Jean de Castile and many others you may have read about but, perhaps, could never quite put the bits of information about them together to see the real picture of life in those times.  I found this book to be refreshing, as well as illuminating to me personally, as many of my ancestors were some of the very people that Ms. Bennett is writing about in her books.  This is the second of her books that I have reviewed and I love her style of writing, her grasp of the lives and personalities of the people she portrays, and her knowledge of the actual history.  The first book of Ms. Bennett’s I read was Portrait of an Unknown Woman (also reviewed on Myshelf), and it was also a very well written story about the royalty of the time and how they lived.  I thoroughly enjoy this author and her very real ideas on the history of Western Europe.  Looking forward to the next royal installment...  Please.