For most of my adolescence, I loved to read historical fiction. I consumed books about Eleanor of Aquitaine and Queen Elizabeth and read the entirety of the historical biography section in the school library. I read other books as well but books set in another place and time were my personal sweet spot. Weirdly, I did not enjoy history in school, where the subject was most often boring and crusty; taught be a series of teachers who were the same. Only in books was history splendid. In college, I discovered that academic history could be amazing; soon after that I became a History and Political Science double major.
The subject of this month’s book report - all 980 pages of it - is historical fiction. The story begins in the late 1800s. the story of a family - the Godwins - and their Welsh estate, Oxmoon. Loosely based on the real-life story of The Black Prince and his wife, Joan of Kent, the novel is utterly compelling. I had read the novel before - back in the 1980s when it was originally published - and all I could remember was that I loved it. When I saw it on the shelf at my local library, I grabbed it right up.
Told in six sections, each narrated by a different member of the Godwin family, the story moves from the 1880s to the 1960s. Each narrator explains their version of the events unfolding and they layer on information about events that have already happened. The result is a rich and compelling story about one family, but they are people who stand in for families everywhere, with their truths, those that matter in the long run as well as those that don’t. Howatch writes beautifully and richly. The leisurely pace of the story matched the relaxed pace of Summer for me. I have hours to read and the novel offered hours of reading…that is my perfect (and happy!) sweet spot.
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