An all-around fun read about a king and a cad.
Weir regales readers with the life of England’s King Henry VIII.
What a life to be king, answerable only to God! Full of hormones and high privilege, Prince Henry, barely into his teens, can hardly wait to feel the weight of the crown on his brow and to marry his late brother’s wife, Katherine of Aragon. But the “Church, for some unfathomable reason, had decreed that boys could not bed their wives until they were fourteen.” Such backward thinking. Finally, in 1509, the 17-year-old ascends to the throne and marries Katherine, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, so they can produce an heir. It’s a wonderful life at first. “He was doing his husbandly duty—and pleasure—nightly now, and soon, surely, Kate would be with child.” That turns out to be a sticky point, as Kate bears him eight children but no surviving son—her fault, of course. Then after 18 years, he ditches Kate for a series of other women such as Anne Boleyn. He is obsessed with siring a future king, believing it against the natural order of the world for a woman to rule (inferior beings, don't have the wits, etc.). There is much more of course, like his wish for a joint English-Spanish conquest of France. But there is a bigger issue with consequences through the centuries. England is a Catholic country in Henry’s day, and his insistence on annulling his marriage to Kate goes down poorly with the pope. That personal issue, as the world knows, leads to the establishment of the Church of England. Meanwhile, Henry (or Harry, as he is sometimes called) takes great pleasure in his adulterous dalliances, in eating and jousting, and in his exercise of power. And don't even think of defying him or plotting against him because you will die. Even predicting the king's death is deemed treason. Weir takes the abundant history and weaves imagined conversations and motivations into a delightful yarn. It's so much better to read about Henry VIII now than to have lived back then.
An all-around fun read about a king and a cad.Pub Date: May 30, 2023
ISBN: 9780593355060
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.
The Medusa myth, reimagined as an Afrocentric, feminist tale with the Gorgon recast as avenging hero.
In mythological Greece, where gods still have a hand in the lives of humans, 17-year-old Medusa lives on an island with her parents, old sea gods who were overthrown at the rise of the Olympians, and her sisters, Euryale and Stheno. The elder sisters dote on Medusa and bond over the care of her “locs...my dearest physical possession.” Their idyll is broken when Euryale is engaged to be married to a cruel demi-god. Medusa intervenes, and a chain of events leads her to a meeting with the goddess Athena, who sees in her intelligence, curiosity, and a useful bit of rage. Athena chooses Medusa for training in Athens to become a priestess at the Parthenon. She joins the other acolytes, a group of teenage girls who bond, bicker, and compete in various challenges for their place at the temple. As an outsider, Medusa is bullied (even in ancient Athens white girls rudely grab a Black girl’s hair) and finds a best friend in Apollonia. She also meets a nameless boy who always seems to be there whenever she is in need; this turns out to be Poseidon, who is grooming the inexplicably naïve Medusa. When he rapes her, Athena finds out and punishes Medusa and her sisters by transforming their locs into snakes. The sisters become Gorgons, and when colonizing men try to claim their island, the killing begins. Telling a story of Black female power through the lens of ancient myth is conceptually appealing, but this novel published as adult fiction reads as though intended for a younger audience.
An engaging, imaginative narrative hampered by its lack of subtlety.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733769
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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