I had the pleasure of visiting historian Annie Whitehead’s blog, who was kind enough to invite me to post an article about appointing a medieval godmother, and include an excerpt from my new novel. Annie also posted this rather splendid review of The Godmother’s Secret.
Read Annie’s post here: Annie Whitehead Blogspot
Review: A Well-researched and Gripping Read
Having read Ms St. John’s previous series and knowing that she is a direct descendant of the family she writes about, I was delighted to find that she has gone further back along her family tree and written about another ancestor, this time Lady Elysabeth Scrope, who was godmother to the boys who came to be known as the Princes in the Tower.
This book has all the elements of really good historical fiction – well-drawn, believable characters, excellent research, and authentic backdrops and descriptions. But it has something else: tension. We know that the Godmother has a secret, and we know that she knows what happened to the boys. The tension builds slowly, but surely, until at the very end my heart was in my mouth – what was the author going to do? She’d decided what happened to them, but wasn’t going to let the reader know until the very end.
The drama unfolds beautifully, and all I can really say, without giving anything away, is that this is just a superbly satisfying read. I thoroughly recommend it and it will add to the ever-popular debate about what happened in those fateful years between 1483 and 1485.
