The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

One cannot criticise a novel unless one has read it. I have now read it and so shall begin.

It's boring, at least 100 (if not 417) pages too long and the writing is predictable and repetitive. The dialogue is stilted and unnatural making the characters indistinct and uninteresting. It doesn't help that there are too many incidental characters, mentioned in passing every now and then, which confuses the narrative. To be fair, it is not the author's fault that the whole of the Royal family are called Edward or Richard but the lack of character depth made it difficult to distinguish who was who, and impossible to summon the energy to try.


I cannot explain why at least one of the series appears in almost every "top 10". In my view, this is a historical book unhappily trapped between a text book and a novel.