So I’ve been digging into the PILE of recommendations y’all gave me in the Rec League for books set in York and Edinburgh. THANK YOU SO MUCH! I’ll be in York for a few days in October and in Edinburgh for nearly a week in October, and I am doing my research. (Watch this space for meetup information.)
This book was billed as “What if the Wars of the Roses never really ended?” The attempt at unifying the Houses of York and Lancaster with the marriage of King Henry VII and Elizabeth of York failed, and conflict between the South of England and North continued.
The Royal Family uses only the Red Rose as their sigil, and the North feels like they’ve been continuously punished by Parliament for supporting the Yorkist claim:
The Yorkish people…were as distinct as the Scots or the Welsh. But rather than be recognized as a country within the Unified Kingdom in its own right, Yorkshire and the entire North – all the counties between Midlands and the Scottish Border- were seen as a backwater. Not worth government money or even a kind word in the myths and legends that drove the nation’s tourist based economy. Even the worst off of the south always fared better.
It’s an interesting premise, and I like positing “what if” historical scenarios and gaming them out.
It’s set in the year About Now, and Arthur, the Prince of Wales, has found himself in need of an heir. And in order to get one of those, he needs a wife. At a horse race, he meets Amelia, the daughter of a Yorkish earl and the little sister of one of his school friends, and he realizes that she’s perfect. She’s of the correct rank, she’s smart and they get on, she’s young enough that she should be able to have and heir and spare in good time, and hey, she’s Northern, so maybe that’ll help heal the rift in the country, right? A neat and tidy political union is just what the doctor ordered.
It’s not QUITE that simple. First, there are the logistics of Amelia learning how to become the Princess of Wales. Princess school is a fun theme, especially when you get discussion of precisely why all this is important. Then there’s selling the entire country (and Canada!) on the idea of a royal wedding uniting north and south. Then there are smaller details: what does she wear? And what does all this actually mean?
What about when emotions rear their ugly heads? You know those? They never show up in romances. (Spoiler: they do.)
I liked this a LOT (like, I went to the Tall Ships Regatta in Boston, and ended up spending an hour in the shade of a nice tree reading this book rather than exploring ships, and I LOVE EXPLORING SHIPS). I liked the world building, and I liked Amelia. I liked how her initial reaction to Arthur’s proposal that they consider this level of political marriage was, “So… I’d be the first Yorkist to sit the throne since Richard III and I could actually create positive change for my people? I can’t say NO, can I? Of course I’ll think about it.”
Both Arthur and Amelia are wrapped up in this idea of duty. He had a perfectly nice first marriage, so he’s not expecting love to come from this one. He gets so stuck in thinking that he can’t choose what he wants for himself because that would be putting the kingdom second that he can’t see that he can have both, because what the heart wants and what the kingdom needs are the same thing! He’s just so completely focused on getting a wife and an heir that anything beyond that is luxury he thinks he can’t afford.
Amelia is also caught up in her duty, but mostly she’s completely overwhelmed by what all this means. There’s a lovely section with the Queen Consort where they discuss the expectations and responsibilities of what she’s getting into. Another factor in getting into a relationship – purely political or not – with the Prince of Wales is going to involve the press and paparazzi, and this isn’t something Amelia has much experience with.
Watching these two idiots work out their personal and public relationship was kind of frustrating (in a fun way) because it involved a lot of Not Talking. My tolerance for this trope varies a lot, but I liked it here. (I just spent two minutes staring into the middle distance trying to figure out why it works for me sometime and why not others, and I have no answers for you.)
The supporting characters were also very interesting. Amelia may be a part of the peerage, but she’s mostly been outside the sphere of the Royal Family. So she has her roommate and best friend, Priya, and a dude that helps her with protocol (He calls himself her Royal Customer Service Representative). Arthur’s sister, Georgiana, is also a super fascinating character. There’s a hint of the supernatural surrounding her affinity with the ravens of the Tower of London (you know about the superstitions of the ravens, right? If the ravens desert the Tower, England will fall).
McRae and Maltese are pretty well known as Queer authors, and you may have noticed that this particular romance is pretty solidly cis and het. There’s a hint of who the next book is about (I’m not even going to hint, because it’s a spoiler and I want you to be as surprised as I am), and that won’t be a cis het relationship.
I’m very much looking forward to the next book (imagine my squeal of indignation when I realized that A Queen From the North was just released at the end of May, which means I need to put my patient pants on. I HATE MY PATIENT PANTS), and I hope that there’s more exploration of the alternate history in the future books.
THANK YOU for this recommendation! I really enjoyed it.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
Adding this to my Kindle wish-list. I love alternate history!
My tolerance for Not Talking seems to be related to How Much Shit Is Going On. If a five-minute conversation will solve every conflict in the story, Not Talking is pure authorial convenience and me no likey. If they have only five minutes to talk because of matters of state, princess school, media blitz, family drama, zombie invasion, and so forth, I can understand that broader issues would take precedence over personal ones, not a single one of those things can be resolved easily so they can get to the personal stuff, and their personal stuff would really benefit from six months of couple’s counseling anyway. I’m also more sympathetic if they WANT to talk but are talk-blocked by external forces rather than stupidity dressed up as pride.
You might be interested in this post where Racheline Maltese talks about feminism, why she writes, and how The Queen from the North fits into her queer feminism. (Note that in it, Racheline identifies the character RHG said she wasn’t going to talk about because of spoilers.)
This looks super interesting. Adding it to the “i want” list 😀
Ooh, this sounds very good. Until you said it was set “About Now,” the cover art made me think the setting might be Victorian. The plot description makes it sound as if it has a little bit in common with “The Royal We,” which I really enjoyed.
This sounds like it hits all my “want to read” buttons. Clicked and bought.
Melanie @#5 except that the building to the right of Elizabeth Tower (which houses the bell Big Ben, along with the other bells and the clock) is Portculis House which only opened in 2001. But I guess you have to know London to know that, or to remember the controversy about how long it took to build and how expensive it was. 😉
Scattergun ideas, since I’m tapping this out on my phone.
I found this a page-turner, although not without niggles. There was a bit much repetition of the importance of becoming a queen from the north, with a bit too little about what that might achieve. Actual power lies with Parliament and Cabinet, so what the royals have is mostly celebrity spotlight to shine on issues that concern them. They can affect morale, yes, but need to be careful about coming across as privileged and unaware of what life’s like for most people.
The developing relationship put me in mind of Diana Spencer’s experience. That was fascinating but not exactly encouraging. One of the things I’ve taken from recent history is that if you’re going into that environment you should do all you can to have a supportive and well-balanced family that stays as a regular part of your life and is clearly there for you. That can also help deal with a bunch of the “not talking” issues, and provide sanity checks about whether your emotional responses are commensurate – and how to manage them in ways which are useful to your aims – in what can clearly be a difficult emotional environment. Amelia didn’t seem to have enough of the wise counsel and support that would help her negotiate her new role.
The Kindle version could have done with a final proofread, mostly for missing words. One quirk that’s on my personal irk list is that it used the word “coronated” (twice, I think) in place of the correct “crowned” (which I noticed that it used at least once). That’s generally a sign of US writers.
Themes with the ravens meant I assumed I was reading magic realism. That, in turn, meant I gave some of the real-world detail a pass that I might not have otherwise. (Except, y’know for people being “coronated”.) There was a “Chekhov’s gun” item introduced that didn’t get used in this novel, so I’m hoping it’ll be brought out in a subsequent novel to resolve the issue it seems to exist to resolve.
I thought there were parallels with Lilah Pace’s “His Royal Secret” and “His Royal Favorite”, especially around protection of a younger relative who’s next in line and really doesn’t want the throne.
This one doesn’t sound like my thing, but Racheline Maltese also writes for the phenomenal web serial Tremontaine, which is sort of not-quite-alternate-history, low-magic fantasy heavily influenced by historical romance. It centers around a clash among an ambitious duchess with Secrets, a foreign chocolate importer/spy (the latter’s culture heavily based on the Maya), and an astronomer who wants to prove geocentrism wrong and start his own school. It has complicated intrigue, duels, lots of queer characters in a queer-friendly world, and an exploration of the ethics of cross-cultural trade and information exchange. The prose is beautiful, and the multiple writers complement each other and make it richer and deeper.
@Althea: I’m not sold on this one either, but goodness, Tremontaine sounds exciting! Thanks for the heads up.
Who would think “coronated” is proper?? The same people who think “conversated” is a word, I guess. SMH
@chacha1 – Agree that I wouldn’t call “coronated” standard American usage by any stretch of the imagination. It’s a totally new one on me and I was startled to see that it apparently appears in other books as well. (Perhaps the mistake can be traced to the same bad but anonymous editor at fault?) On the other hand, I’ve heard “conversated” a lot, and while it irks me professionally as an English composition teacher, why the hatred and vitriol for a dialect word, usually used in my experience by students who are desperately trying to appear grown-up and sophisticated? A gentle correction is fine, but why curse at a teenager who’s making the perfectly logical (and therefore in English untenable) assumption that the rule for narration/narrate and operation/operate holds good for conversation too?
In any case, I agree that “coronate” marks the book as badly written more than as American. What I’d say sounds like an American sensibility (and of course I’m not English so I could be wrong) is the blithe assumption that the North-South split in England in the present day is an “alternate” history. As best as I can judge from opinion pages in The Guardian and conversations with people in the UK, the divide between the North and the South is very much alive and well and a royal marriage would do sweet FA to bridge it, since it’s largely class based in addition to geographical. (Actually it was the memory of Owen Jones’ book Chavs, which touches on this somewhat, that made my hackles rise a bit about hating on “conversate.” Not using standard English is a marker of social class, not of mental or moral qualities.)
It was frankly news to me that the “wars of the roses” had anything to do with north vs. south … especially since Lancaster is in fact north of York.
I enjoyed this, even with a couple of proofing issues – coronated, as above but also the consistent references to ‘Buckingham’: I was deeply confused when they strolled from Buckingham to St James’ Palace – that’s a flippin’ long way from the city of Buckingham, but then I realised that they meant Buckingham *Palace*. This side of the pond we always add the ‘palace’ (except, bizarrely, for St James’!), the same way we always say street or road in an address.
Oh, and discrete is absolutely not the same as discreet!
But quibbles notwithstanding, it was a fun read, so thank you for the recommendation.
Yeah, to add a voice to (a) there is a real life issue with the North of England being neglected by successive governments, mainly due to a combination of class issues and London’s gravitational pull and (b) North v South makes no sense for the War of the Roses. Yorkist and Lancastrian referred to houses that had little to do with the counties of York and Lancashire (both of which are Northern), and battle lines were drawn up all over the country. When we have a civil war (the actual Civil War wiping out the last lineage quibbles of the War of the Roses) we like to arbitrarily divide up towns and cities and countrysides willy-nilly and march around our own allies to have battles. It’s about who’s friends with who in Parliament, not who lives near who.
Replying to MinaKelly:
Yes, the real-life UK north vs south divide is a thing, and has been for a long while. There are 2 things that affect my head-canon about how north and south are tied to Yorkist and Lancastrian in this book:
1. The historical estates of York and Lancaster were spread around the country, and were quite intermingled. It wasn’t a case of “I have the title of Duke of Lancaster, so all my holdings are near Lancaster”.
2. In my head-canon, the (apparently?) victorious Lancastrians took control of London, and rewarded their supporters with estates in the home counties. The Yorkists were left with the fringes.
I’m still a bit puzzled about other aspects of the alternative history, though. Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII are mentioned. If Henry VIII was the Henry we know, then the war had ended and been resolved when his parents married: they were pretty much the last heirs standing from the two sides.
There were some who might have supported Elizabeth of York as a queen regnant, and Henry VII seems to have been quite sensitive about that when planning his coronation and their wedding. Whatever you thought about the claims of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York separately, though, their children carried the claims of both sides. Might as well give up fighting over it. So I’m not quite sure how you get to that point and still have the tensions described.
The fact that I’m writing all this is a sign that it both bothered and intrigued me.
The authors’ note at the start of the book answers some of my questions:
“Most critically, however, in this world the Wars of the Roses never truly ended. The Tudor unification attempted by Henry VIII fell apart after his death, and the battles and political struggles between York and Lancaster persisted for centuries. The north – centered around York – and the south – centered around London – are locked in an eternal conflict that’s left York very much the loser.”
That explains where I got my head-canon idea about London, but doesn’t help with what “York” and “Lancaster” meant after Henry VIII died. As noted above, the unification project was the work of Henry VIII’s father, Henry VII, and Henry VIII and his siblings were the heirs of both York and Lancaster. Even if Henry VIII had no surviving direct heirs in this alternative history, he had sisters who also carried the claims of York and Lancaster. His sisters’ children included the royal line of Scotland – maybe leading to an earlier union of kingdoms – and the family of Jane Grey.
There must be some more historical tweaking for there to be other Yorkist and Lancastrian claimants, and for them to get the throne over the Tudor sisters. I’m curious about what that tweaking might look like.
This just had a price drop to $2.99 Amazon US.
@Hanaper the set up has kept following me around too, and what occurred to me is if you want a North/South is you either start much earlier (William the Conquerer v Harald Hardrada v Harold Godwinson, with a Viking kingdom surviving alongside Norman England) or a bit later (James VI of Scotland never becomes James I of Great Britain). Assuming the division of land is still the result of the Reformation, Jane Grey remains a pawn in the Protestant/Catholic divide (and must be even younger when she’s offered the throne, poor thing!). Reigniting the the war of the roses after Henry VIII erases at least part of the violent history of Catholicism vs Protestantism, which does weird things not only to the history of the UK (Civil War?) but also Europe (who does Phillip of Spain marry if not Mary?) and America (do the puritans ever leave England?).
I really like alternate histories, and they make for some great thought experiments, but it feels a little like this novel began with the modern day premise, latched on to the fact the War of the Roses has romantic title, and then tried to join the two up. Alt Hist is a lot of work to pull off, and it’s so distracting when you find yourself more interested in the missing links in the chain than the characters.
As with a lot of alternate histories, I was totally sucked in while reading the story, and then with a little distance I started to ask question (I had the same question about how Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth could be part of the historical narrative if the Wars of the Roses had gone differently). I loved Amelia and Arthur and their relationship, and some of the little details (for instance, how his parents gave him the name Arthur so he would always have a name that was all his, because he would have to take a different regnant name). I was OK with the Not Talking About Things trope in this case, because these are two people (esp Arthur) for whom privacy and trust are rightfully a huge deal, and in particular Arthur’s reluctance to be open with Amelia is an ongoing issue and not a final-act plot twist. I really wished they had done more showing and less telling to explain why it was that Amelia was willing to get involved in this on behalf of the North. We never really see the North other than a couple scenes at Amelia’s family home and the royal trip to York, so it was hard to know what she was trying to remedy or what the consequences would be for failing. My other issue was that a late-30s hero and a college student heroine does edge into uncomfortable territory for me in terms of the age divide. I would have been more comfortable if Amelia had been aged up just a couple of years (I realize a lot of this story is about the power differential, which is entwined in the age/experience differential.)