Katherine
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- Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 Stars
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Customer Reviews
- Katherine
- Reviewer: Divapat , Date of review: August 24, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- This book was written in the year I was born, so I didn't read my mom's hard copy until I was in my mid to late teens. Needless to say, I fell in love with the book and re-read it countless times -- until the covers literally fell off! I purchased this paperback copy in order to keep my library complete.
The fact that Katherine Swynford and John of Gaunt were real people attracted the history buff in me. Their thrilling romance, set against the backdrop of political intrigue in 12th century England, made this a page-turner each time I read it.
For the romantics in the crowd, this is a perfect vehicle for either beach-reading or for curling up in front of a cozy fire and letting your imagination run wild! Enjoy!
- Katherine
- Reviewer: jimisrisingsun (Iowa), Date of review: July 11, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- What an amazing love story it tells of Katherine DE Roet's love affair with John of Gaunt that lasted through decades before he was able to marry her and make their for Beaufort children legitimate. Well researched and well told this will be one of your favorite books too.
- Less Than a Masterpiece
- Reviewer: Esther Shay (EUGENE, OREGON, US), Date of review: June 30, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 3 Stars
- A better-than-average historical novel, admirably researched and (who knows?) a possible
approximation of what may have happened--but hardly the masterpiece I might have been led to
expect from other reviews. Its chief virtues lie in the author's ability to evoke and convey
all the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, horrors and colorful pageantry of the late Middle Ages,
and I, for one, fairly bask in that kind of detail. . . But I found her far less successful in
her attempts to delineate the passions, prejudices, and foibles of her characters. It would
help if she didn't try so hard--insisting, for instance (and quite repetitiously) that this is
a great love epic while never showing what it is, besides sex, that is holding her two protago-
nists together over so many years.
Katherine's shifting emotional crises and their too-easy resolutions are never very convincing
and seemed to be driven more by the exigences of the plot, and need for a "happy ending," than
by understanding of character. John of Gaunt comes through as a weak, even dangerous man; and
there is a preposterous and really SILLY scene in which Katherine cures him of his childhood
demons, using the pseudo-Freudian devices of 20th Century "pop" psychology.
That the great poet Geoffrey Chaucer was Katherine's brother-in-law was one of my reasons for
choosing to read this novel. But the Chaucer who passes through these pages is a mere pragmatist--
a GENIAL presence but quite incapable of poetic GENIUS!
Still, it was an interesting "read" and fairly memorable--and made me want to know more about
the historical Richard II (much more maligned here than by Shakespeare). And by the way: does
anybody out there know if there was a REAL Lady Julian?
- My Introduction to History
- Reviewer: T. A. Mason (Lake Jackson, TX USA), Date of review: June 23, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 5 Stars
- I first read this book at age 16. I have yet to read another historical romance that even remotely compares to the depth and power of this wondrous novel depicting a distinct turning point in history and the extraordinary woman who made it happen. Ms Seyton's other novels are grand, but this one blazes. I add to the thoughts of others that I am glad to see this novel back in print and available to another generation. Katherine deserves to be read and reread.
- Clearly Lacking Dimension... and an Editor
- Reviewer: The Boleyn Girl (Pennsylvania, USA), Date of review: June 18, 2010
- Avg. Customer Rating: 2 Stars
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
- In the past, I've heard of Anya Seton's reputation as a writer of saccharine escapist fiction, but never really understood it. Devil Water, in my opinion, was a smashing read, and if the second half diverged into a little bit of a fairly tale, the first part was filled with characters as real as their historical blueprints. Dragonwyck, too, had that whimsical sense, but it wasn't too terribly written, nor was it boring. KATHERINE, however, is the novel from which Anya Seton clearly got her reputation and, after reading so many rave reviews, I'm really surprised at how boring and badly written the novel actually is.
Seton eschews the use of semicolons, colons, dashes, and conjunctions, preferring to string together sentences with commas. I've never read so many run-on sentences in a published work. Not only grammatically lacking, Katherine abounded with useless paragraphs and distracting, needless detail, so that one hardly lost anything in sometimes skipping full pages altogether. The prose was cluttered and heavy-handed, and did not read smoothly at all. A good editor would have sorted this problem out, so I'm curious as to how this got past the publishing house in the first place. Furthermore, none of this detail served to make clear its point. When Seton wrote about the political atmosphere, she listed event after event, but without giving the reader any true feel for what had happened or what the motivations behind it were. The main characters seemed to float in a bubble, detached from their time period and only carrying vestiges of contemporary thought and behavior. Don't misunderstand me. Katherine and the Duke were not entirely anachronistic like some historical fiction characters, but they didn't seem to belong in their surroundings either.
The main problem with this novel is that it was neither intelligent nor fun. You can have one without the other and still have a good book, but to lack both makes Seton's Katherine a chore to read. First, its theme was muddled. At times, love conquered all, even religion. Later, holiness must come before romance. When Katherine regains her lost piety, it seems to serve for naught but clearing her own conscience. If she had any true convictions at all, then I did not spot them. In general, I found Seton's portrayal of Katherine Swynford naive, one-dimensional, and unattractive. I understand this is a love story, but when the only thing that can be said of a character is that she's ridiculously besotted with the hero, there's something very wrong with the characterization. I was also disgusted that Katherine never had a second thought about caring more for the Duke than her own children. And that the novel presented this stupid, baseless infatuation as nothing less than pure, destined love. I felt that the characters were all hopeless idiots, and that I was reading a parody of them rather than the true novel. Perhaps the only exceptions to this were Blanchette and sometimes Hawise, for at moments I could sympathize with and like them. Otherwise, I quickly became irritated with the whole plot. The use of cliches and improbable inner dialogue, coupled with completely ludicrous discourse and faux psychology made Katherine one of the worst books I've read in a few months, and from an author like Seton, whom I usually respect, an utter disappointment. Two stars.