Welcome back to Lightning Reviews! This is where we write some quick, miniature reviews of books we’ve read. Some are new. Some are older. But all of the reviews are less than five-hundred words! This time, we have the last book in Alisha Rai’s Forbidden Hearts series, a big DNF, and some nonfiction.
Black Tudors
author: Miranda Kaufmann
Black Tudors: The Untold Story is a nonfiction book about the presence of Black people in England during the Tudor area. The book profiles ten real people, such as John Blanke, trumpeter; Jacques Francis, salvage diver; and Diego, circumnavigator. A wide variety of occupations are listed, and three of the ten people profiled are women.
The author has pulled names from records wherever they might be found – for instance, Jacques Francis was involved in a court case, and a parish clerk described the baptism of Mary Fillis, a servant from Morocco. From these records, the author uses what was happening historically at the time to try to suggest what this person’s life might have been like. There’s speculation, but not wild speculation.
Because the people have such different occupations and social classes, we get a view of many different parts of life in the Tudor era. The catch, of course, is that subjects of the book don’t have full biographies. In the records of the Tudors, they have a mention here, and a mention there, and then they are gone. So the reader ends up knowing a lot about their occupation and how they may have lived, but very little about the actual person. For instance, in the chapter about Anne Cobbie, I learned a lot about terminology and a lot about prostitution but not a lot about Anne Cobbie herself.
The main point the book makes is that Black people could be found all over England, in all walks of life. Their presence was just unusual enough to be remarked upon in record but not so unusual as to be rare or shocking. If there is anyone left who still insists that you can’t have Black people in historical fiction set in Europe, this book quite neatly proves them wrong. Plus there are pictures! This was not the most thrilling or adventurous book I’ve ever read, but it was fun and extremely informative to dip into it a chapter at a time.
– Carrie S
Nonfiction
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Hurts to Love You
author: Alisha Rai
The final book in the Forbidden Hearts series offers a deliciously awkward romance, but is bogged down a bit by the resolution of plotlines started in the prior two books. It’s still a very enjoyable read, but it’s weaker than the previous two novels because the sheer number of loose ends that need to be resolved detracted from the romance. Also, the series should be read in order.
Eve, the youngest member of the Chandler clan, has been nursing a crush on Gabriel Hunter, a friend of the Kane family. Years ago he politely rejected her, and shy Eve took it to heart. Now they’re stuck together (partially by Eve’s planning) in a luxurious family lakehouse for a wedding.
Gabe has some serious pants feelings for Eve, too, but he’s been hiding them. This romance is straight up “two dorks who want each other but don’t act on it because they think it’s unrequited” which is so much my catnip. The sexual tension here is amazing.
We also finally get the full story of all of the Chandler/Kane secrets that the series has been built upon. It’s a lot of reveals and one scene felt to me like those old mysteries where everyone is assembled in the library and the detective says, “I’ve called you all here today because one of you is the murderer” but it did wrap up all the loose ends.
I also loved that Eve is working hard on herself, and struggling to heal the scars left by her father’s emotional abuse. She has a best friend who is amazing and a prime example of women being supportive and helping other women heal. In terms of growth, Eve comes much farther in this book than Gabe.
Hurts to Love You is definitely worth the read, but you will want to read the other two books in the series first. It’s a very sexy end to the trilogy, but it wasn’t quite as stellar as the first two books.
– Elyse
Romance, Contemporary Romance
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The Year of Less
author: Cait Flanders
I loved the cover of this book, I was so curious about it, and I even thought about asking my library to order me a copy, but it was on sale for $1.99, so I grabbed it and started reading immediately. I ignored my ordered and dated to-be-read schedule spreadsheet, and I wish I hadn’t.
I love books that explore habits and behavior, and unpack and examine the minutiae of why we do things. In this book, the author examines her most destructive habits, which include blackout drinking and blackout spending to the point where she lost large portions of her memory of nights out, and carried tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Following the idea that complete abstention would work for her, she gives up drinking after a few false starts, and then decides to create rules for herself that would limit her spending. No shopping for an entire year, except for within specific parameters.
I was disappointed by the indulgent, overly meandering stories that grew and compounded like those topsy-turvy wedding cakes everyone used to put on Pinterest. Each chapter, which corresponded to a month in that calendar year, was more about the emotional upheaval and the writer’s complete personal history of whatever event was happening that month (e.g. Christmas, job travel, relationship ending, relationship restarting, job frustrations). Moreover, I was very frustrated with the minimal attention given to the underlying reasons for personally dangerous habits and the cavalier manner in which other treatment options and therapies were dismissed.
You know that feeling when you go to a food blog for a recipe and have to scroll through 10,000 words of the blogger’s personal history before you even get to the ingredients list? Every chapter of this book gave me that feeling of frustration and scrolling futility. (I fully realize that in terms of brevity as a blogger I have NO room to talk whatsoever.) I wanted to learn more about the reasons behind the decision to eliminate acquisition of stuff, and what was difficult about that experience. I didn’t want ten to fifteen pages of personal history that didn’t have much bearing on the subject.
I wanted to know more about the year of less. Instead, I received way, way too much about every year prior to that one, so I gave up.
– SB Sarah
Nonfiction
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@SBSarah, I have a hard time with some of the “A Year of…” books because they seem gimmicky and self indulgent. The premise can be amusing, like a year of living biblically, but I’m not clear why they require an ENTIRE BOOK. An longish essay might be more appropriate. I also know that I don’t always have a lot of patience with books, they need to get my attention and hold it or I’m out.
I enjoyed the Year of Less book a little bit more I think because I had heard interviews with Flanders before I read it. Those interviews did flesh out the actual shopping ban exercise she did and helped. But I did think that some of the stories she told seemed to use overly dramatic language that made it difficult for me to take over stories seriously. For example, the story about the great family Christmas ended with something about it being the last Christmas they had together (said in an ominous fashion). As someone who has recently dealt with the death of a parent, I assumed that’s also what she had gone through. It wasn’t.
I read Black Tudors, and while I found it interesting, I wish she hadn’t done the silly little introductory vignettes at the start of each chapter. I really hate that trend in current NF. (I skipped them all.) It’s also a fair warning that this is very clearly someone’s dissertation that got turned into a book, so it is at times a bit dry and academic.
My rating for Black Tudors it 4/5 with a note, “drawn from scraps of information.” I agree about the vignettes – I can see why they were put in, to give a feeling of the time. But there was so little information that often the vignettes covered everything that the chapter would discuss. However, I did enjoy the book and it certainly opened up a sector of history that I knew little about.