Review from the past: Queen’s gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle

I started this book blog in August 2020, during one of the covid lockdowns. But of course, I’ve been reading historical fiction for a much longer time. Since 2012, I keep a record of every book I read on Goodreads and since 2014 I write reviews in Dutch on Goodreads. It’s nice to still have my initial idea about a book.

I think it could be fun to review those older books here once in a while. The idea is to translate my old review and than add a paragraph about what I still know about it today.

I decided to start with one of my favourite books read in 2016, September 2016 to be precise: ‘Queen’s gambit’.

Old review:

This book is about Catherine Parr, the last wife of Henry VIII and actually the most interesting woman of all six. And yet this was the first time I read a book about her.

The book is alternately written from Catherine’s point of view, her maid Dot and her doctor Huicke. I loved that alternation in perspectives and I really had a huge match with Dot.

Fremantle is a great discovery. Her writing style just drags you into court life. I found few historical errors and except for a few things at the end, I could quite agree with her interpretation of events. Fremantle writes a level better than Gregory as far as I am concerned (and she also writes less fluffy which sometimes annoys me with Gregory).

Queen’s Gambit beautifully portrays what court life at the time of a Henry VIII in his final years must have been like: rising tensions between Catholics and Protestants, constant threats, the king’s tantrums, gossip and families who keep pushing their young girls forward as if they were goods on the market.

In short: I want to read more from Fremantle and I’m very curious to see if another historical novel will blow me away as much this year.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4.5 out of 5.

2023 interpretation:

It’s funny to see my writing style from that period 😅 (I just Deepl’ed -is that a word- it and than made a few changes). As you can tell, this was my first Elizabeth Fremantle book and I immediately loved it. I also still read books from Philippa Gregory and this was just a nice discovery that there were other authors who wrote about the Tudor period (but less fluffy 😁).

What I still remember from it is that I just loved Dot. She was such a great character but I don’t know exactly anymore how her story evolves (except that she finds Catherine’s warrant for her arrest). I also do think this is one of the better books about Catherine Parr (I still need to read Alison Weir’s book about her).

This year, Queen’s gambit is being adapted for television. The adaptation is called ‘Firebrand’ and Alecia Vikander (I love her!) will play Catherine Parr and Jude Law will be Henry VIII. The movie has already premiered at the film fest of Cannes but I don’t know if you can already see it somewhere. I’m excited to watch it and see what I still remember from the book.

Do you ever reread older reviews?