Katherine Longshore

King Henry VIII's interest in Anne Boleyn could give her an opportunity to make a real impact in a world with few choices for women, but when poet Thomas Wyatt reveals that he's fallen for her, Anne must choose between true love and the chance to make history.

Tarnish

jess

let me start this one out by saying that i love english royal history, or at least am starting to love it. remember richard iii? i blame that, which is the first time english class has ever gotten me into anything. so i took out tarnish because you know, anne boleyn. and i’m not going to say i knew a lot about her before reading, and maybe that affected my experience. i looked her up on wikipedia. and i do think that she’s interesting (and it was her that caused henry i don’t know what the number is to split from the catholic church) and this book did an okay job of making her seem like it. 

first of all anne is a very confident and impulsive woman. she was interesting when she spoke, but i feel like her inner voice - her narration - was rather dull. i found i had to force my way through the book. and there wasn’t much conflict or tension, either, i felt. the plot needs work. the plot needs a lot of work. perhaps it was because i just came from reading a book with high stakes, and yes, that is more of the type of the book i enjoy, but i didn’t like the plot. once again, we get a bloody love triangle. (okay, so i said, i didn’t like reading cishet romances unless they stood out … but like, i thought this would stand out.) more like a love polygon, because you’ve got the stuff with percy and then you’ve got wyatt and you know that anne ends up with the king at the end. it is a Foregone Conclusion. 

maybe it was just that the type of story that longshore chose to write wasn’t my preference. i realize now i would much rather read about anne boleyn’s later life, before she was executed. i see how i would have liked it, and there were some tense parts but not enough. a lot of it was sitting around and talking, or the romance part. 

what i did like was the relationship with anne and mary, and anne and jane. those were a lot better than how the romance with wyatt was portrayed. and i know that anne did get together with king henry but here, it seemed very quickly brought on and it didn’t come across as strong as i would have liked. 

katherine longshore, though, is great at describing things. i could picture anne’s world, the english royal court, and i could picture the dresses and the people in it and what she was seeing. i don’t think the present tense narration worked out very well in this book, though. it works for some books and it doesn’t work for others and this was one it didn’t work for. i felt disconnected to anne even though a first person perspective, while there are books that i feel fully connected to a character even though it’s third person. 

anne was a good character, though. i did like her. i think that she was portrayed as being very confident and sure of herself, and also wanting to have a voice in something. that was another thing i liked. historical queens are great and anne is one of them. she stuck out in a good way and made me like her throughout the book, even if she was a little too dependent on men for my liking. (then again this is the 16th century what am i expecting.)

i give this book a 5/10 and recommend this for anyone who likes the history of the english monarchy, or anyone who likes historical romance

Laura

I actually like the covers of these books. I like the way they look on the shelf together too. But as a whole, I don't think I really like the books themselves.

I wasn't expecting to read this book next. But I didn't want to start my Valentine's Day book until it was closer to actual Valentine's Day so I pulled this book off my TBR stack and figured it would be a quick read. I ended up having to finish it at 10 o'clock at night because I didn't want to carry reading it into Monday. This book was not the quick read Gilt was for me. Frankly, this book could have been cut down at least 100 pages and still would have made a cohesive narrative. But I am seeing some writing issues that I can't write off as rookie mistakes anymore. I can tell that Longshore has a problem with repetition. The overused sheep metaphor was used a lot, as well as the whole idea of being trapped and the amount of times the word tarnish (or a form of the word) appeared made me want to take a shot every time it showed up. I also noticed a big problem with Longshore's dialogue, and that is that she'll have some really authentic-sounding dialogue, and it really fits in well with the time period and then all of sudden modern words and phrases will jarringly appear. I noticed it in Gilt, but dismissed it as an easy fix. The fix never happened, so now I have to talk about it. Bad, Longshore, bad.

Anne was another big problem. One Goodreads reviewer commented that it seemed like Anne had been declawed, and that is true. The Anne in this novel seemed like some feminist, too modern for the time she grew up in. That is false, and frankly insulting to the real Anne Boleyn, who was so much more than that. I wish this book had portrayed her as the ruthless social climber she probably was instead of foisting her into this role of a whiny girl who just wanted love and especially Daddy's love. She would never have truly fallen for a poet, she was more pragmatic than that. She aimed far higher than that. I also snorted with laughter at her whole "Mary (as in Henry's daughter Mary) will be queen" speech. She hated her stepdaughter, and the only reason why she would have been in favor of a queen was because of her own daughter. I think I also laughed because the whole speech was about how women might be better leaders than men, but then you realize she's arguing for a woman who ordered the death of hundreds of Protestants at the stake and placed her own half-sister (Anne's daughter, nonetheless) under house arrest, earning the nickname Bloody Mary. I guess women aren't better leaders after all. I was also disappointed that a key part of her personality was left out and that was her Protestantism. Anne was a huge champion of Erasmus, and often gave her lady's maids his pamphlets or work to read.

I noticed that whenever Longshore wants to show that so and so is a bad guy she overdoes it, like with James Butler. Yeah, he probably wasn't a peach, but she way overdid it. His sexism was laughable because it was so over the top. Also, the fat and undesirable potential fiance? Someone's read Catherine Called Birdy, I see. I also didn't really care about Thomas Wyatt, and all the romantic scenes with him just made this book drag. I wanted more court intrigue, not more romance for a couple that didn't work out. And then there was Anne's heel-face love for Henry. She literally went from being in lurve with Wyatt to falling hard for the king out of nowhere. Both Gilt and Tarnish lagged horribly in the middle, and I think it's because a whole lotta nothing happened. Which normally, I'm fine with, but I have to actually give a damn about the characters and the nothing that fills those pages can't be romance, because romance is even more boring than no plot at all. 

So what do I like? As much as I didn't like Anne, I liked that she was, in fact, the narrator and not some side character like in Gilt. It made the story feel more centralized. I liked Longshore's author note at the end. As I mentioned in my Gilt review, it is nice to see Henry VIII portrayed the way he is in these books. I liked George, and I liked their sibling relationship, even if it isn't entirely accurate. George and Wyatt's friends were great, and they reminded me of the Life or Death Brigade from the Gilmore Girls, which I loved. And of course, the costume porn was great, even if I did get annoyed by Anne's critique of the ceruse, especially the medical effects of it. It's unlikely that Anne would know that the make-up caused women's hair and teeth to fall out, especially since this is a pre-Enlightenment society when medicine was very, very primitive. 

I'm still going to read Brazen, mostly because, and I have to hand it to Longshore, these books are hella addictive. I also think she has interesting ideas that lack in execution. Once I've finished Brazen, which I already ordered, I'll write my final thoughts on the series, but I feel like right now I'm continuing with the series because I have to, not because I want to.

Tarnish

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