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babewiththepower.bsky.social · @babewiththepower.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated Wolf Hall 4/10

I first picked up this book a few weeks after I read that the author, Mantel, had passed away. My curiosity was piqued that she was well known for this book and I had never heard of it or her. I have a real fascination with the era of the War of the Roses and the Tudors and history involving the monarchy in England, so this was surprising to me. Of course I had to check it out, especially since I'd never read anything from the Cromwell perspective and because this book was an award winner.<br/><br/>It wasn't until I'd started it and it seemed a bit on the dry and slow side that I scrolled through some Goodreads reviews for it and found a lot of people really disliked it. A major problem, of the reviews I saw at any rate, seemed to be readers having a hard time keeping track of who was being referred to because there was a lot of first-person and usage of "he" without saying which "he." I'm pretty good at keeping track of those sorts of things, but I also found it occasionally confusing. I can see why so many people had problems with that. You can't enjoy a book if you can't keep track of who's doing what in a plot.<br/><br/>That said, I didn't have too much a problem with that but it did become tiresome to constantly watch out for it. What I did have a problem with was how tedious it was to read this book. Considering the effect of Thomas Cromwell on English history, it's amazing how the author managed to make this book so boring! It didn't start to pick up a little bit until Part Four of Six around the year 1532 and since the book covers 1500 to 1535 you can just imagine. That was about halfway through a book some 530 pages long! The last 100/150 pages were the most interesting, relatively, and it ends just I was finally reading at a decent clip. I'm not exaggerating when I say I spent a month to struggle through the first half, put the book down for 3 months because I wasn't excited about picking it up at all, and then powered through the second half in a couple of weeks.<br/><br/>Mostly I picked it back up because it was borrowed from the library and I was determined to actually finish it now that I'd made it halfway through. Even though the second half was much more interesting to me, it just didn't quite manage to save the author's style for me to pick up what I figure is at least one more book after this one considering it's labeled "Thomas Cromwell, #1." I'm just glad I finally finished it and the next victim can pick it up at the library.<br/><br/>I'll have to find some other book if I want something from the Cromwell viewpoint that hooks me into what I'm sure was a lot of underhandedness, intrigue, and general evil doings.

#book

Published 2026-08-18 17:59 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere