Review: Stormfågel

Stormfågel by Conn Iggulden
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed Conn Iggulden's other two series, about Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, but this one I wasn't too excited to get started on. I don't know anything about this time period, and frankly, it doesn't interest me too much. Then again, I thought something very similar about the Genghis Khan series and I enjoyed that a lot. Maybe too much: I'm like the only person who watched that Marco Polo show on Netflix (and is still rooting for a second season), mostly because the Conqueror series made me interested in that time period).

This did not have that effect on me. Partly because there's no real main characet here: the other two series were clearly about one person and their life history, but this ... I don't know? Maybe Henry VI, but that guy barely had a spoken line throughout the book so he hardly counts. I guess the War of Roses is supposed to be the "main character", but it's very hard to relate to a war, you know?

I also had trouble keeping up with how time passed in the novel: it felt as if it was just a few months, but it could also have been years? This may be due to liberties taken by Conn Iggulden about actual historical events, but it made it hard to keep up with stuff.

I did like Margaret though, and her relationship with her sister, which did not turn out the way I thought it would. While she did become awesome by the end of the book (or like, after a few hundred pages), we never really see her learning to play political games and shit. It doesn't seem likely she's just a natural at it, so something more on that would've been nice.

But it was a good book. I do wish everyone didn't have the same five names to go around though, but that's not something I can blame the author for.

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True story.