A memorable short novel about a Caribbean teenager who comes to the US to look after a white American family’s children. Lucy is a little naïve, a little tactless, sometimes quite observant, and doing some rapid growing up in a strange country. Recommended.
From the Heart of Europe
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Mantel walks a narrow line here between humanizing Thomas Cromwell and justifying or excusing his monstrous behaviour, and I’m not always sure she stays on the right line of it. In this volume she faces the problem of how Cromwell can retain at least some of the reader’s sympathy while he goes about manufacturing the charge of adultery against Anne Boleyn. She has a neat solution to this problem (the accused were complicit in the fall of Cromwell’s patron Wolsey), but I found myself rebelling against it—the level of complicity is grossly disproportionate to the level of Cromwell’s revenge, and the little bits of invention are just a bit too neat.
I did like the creepy way that Henry lurks in the background of the novel. If this series has any kind of message, it’s an indictment of absolute monarchy. Everyone in the court tries to gain advancement by fulfilling Henry’s whim, no matter how childish. Henry never has to order Anne’s execution, he just hints at his desire for it to happen, and his courtiers arrange it.