A Want of Kindness

Why do we read historical novels centered on real people? If the answer is to get insight into their interior lives via the license of a novelist to attempt to reconstruct it, this book is not a good choice. Queen Anne was deeply shortchanged in life--her father, James the turd deliberately educated her as a country squires wife rather than a potential heir to the throne, her bad eyesight made self education difficult, and her status usually meant that she was acted upon rather than a decision maker, even up to her elevation to the throne. Someone who could show us what this was like would have a terrific book, but Limberg has chosen a style in which she can't manage to both give the background of complex Restoration events like the Titus Oates affair AND Anne's limited view of them, and she lacks a sense of her subject past dull, over emotional fat girl. Still waiting for a good novel about Anne.