DAUGHTER OF GASCONY

The utterly unconvincing fanfaronade concerns Janine de Foix, French beauty, bandit and patriot whose exploits preceded Joan of Arc's by about fifty years. Often buckled with rhetoric when most it swashes, it offers a Janine whose rapier-ache is most ineffectual. The bare outlines of her story are that she was (perhaps) abducted in infancy by a band of rogues and grew up with them. Later, when she was re-kidnapped by her own father, she fought at his side against the English and the Regents, married Matthew de Castelbon and eventually had five children. In this novel she appears with ""shimmering and wheat-colored"" waist-length hair, speaks in ""a surprisingly cultured"" voice, and her ""blue-green eyes, unusually large and fringed with long lashes"", are generally scornful, especially of men. The dialogue is no more original than the detail and this is silly, meretricious stuff.