LIONHEART by Sharon Kay Penman

Review by Jerelyn (I-F-Letty)

I have read Lionheart twice and have just had the extreme pleasure of listening to it.  Yes finally a Penman novel on audio.  The Narrator Emily Grey does a fine job and one of the things I like most about listening to an audio book is for the pronunciation of languages I am unfamiliar with.

Ms. Penmen’s works are dense and take concentration, the world often fades away as I read or in this case listen to her work, and when I am interrupted it takes time for me to come back to myself.

Lionheart is the 4th book in the Angevin saga that will end up spanning five  books. The 5^th book is also a bridge to her earlier work: Here be Dragons and the accompanying books collectively known as the Welsh trilogy.  But all of Ms. Penman’s books can stand alone.  I am a devotee of Penman’s work and have read and reread all of her books.  She never ceases to amaze me with her skill; her writing is as close to perfection as one could ask.  She is a novelist true but she offers characters so fully rendered, that at times you have to remember to tell yourself that besides the thorough research, the rest is supposition. She gets the psychology of the characters right, and their reactions to situations are so real that it is uncanny.  She knows the history, customs, morals, the religion and the political climate of the time period, I feel very comfortable with her conclusions.

Richard I has been a prisoner of propaganda for so long that it must have been a mammoth undertaking, separating the wheat from the chaff so to speak.  Sharon Penman is one of the only people I can imagine trusting to do this.  She shuns the salacious, and as in the case of Richard’s Queen Berengaria (about which very little is actually know) Sharon give an intelligent hypothesis of what she was like, going on the knowledge of the time period, customs, and practices of noble women in the last years of the 12^th and early 13^th centuries; and leaves us with a fully fleshed out believable character.

So whether you are like me and love to read whatever Ms. Penman writes, or you want a painstakingly researched and thoroughly readable history of the third crusade with a story to accompany the facts, I cannot recommend Lionheart highly enough.  5 stars!

Tags: Book Recommendations, Book Reviews, Book Suggestions

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