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A review by kentcryptid
To Shield the Queen by Fiona Buckley
5.0
It's so satisfying when you read a book, love it, and then realise it's the start of a series and you've got so many more books to read and enjoy.
To Shield the Queen (or The Robsart Mystery as my version was actually called; To Shield the Queen is a better title) follows a young widow named Ursula who takes up a place as a lady in waiting at the court of Elizabeth I. Needing extra money to provide for her daughter, she accepts an assignment from Robert Dudley - scandalously, the queen's paramour - to guard his estranged wife, who fears death by poison.
This book is under 300 pages, but the author still manages a complex plot with a lot of moving pieces and a ton of great character development. On page two Ursula describes her sadness at having to dismiss a man who's worked for her during her entire life, and who she obviously regards as family, because she can't afford to continue paying him. When I found myself getting choked up, despite literally having just met both these characters, I knew the book was going to be a winner.
There's also a lot of delicious detail about clothes, the speed a group of horse riders can travel in a day if one of them isn't very good rider and keeps falling off their horse, court politics and the social divides caused by living in a country which has spent the last thirty years seesawing dangerously between Catholicism and Anglicanism, which is absorbing rather than distracting.
To Shield the Queen (or The Robsart Mystery as my version was actually called; To Shield the Queen is a better title) follows a young widow named Ursula who takes up a place as a lady in waiting at the court of Elizabeth I. Needing extra money to provide for her daughter, she accepts an assignment from Robert Dudley - scandalously, the queen's paramour - to guard his estranged wife, who fears death by poison.
This book is under 300 pages, but the author still manages a complex plot with a lot of moving pieces and a ton of great character development. On page two Ursula describes her sadness at having to dismiss a man who's worked for her during her entire life, and who she obviously regards as family, because she can't afford to continue paying him. When I found myself getting choked up, despite literally having just met both these characters, I knew the book was going to be a winner.
There's also a lot of delicious detail about clothes, the speed a group of horse riders can travel in a day if one of them isn't very good rider and keeps falling off their horse, court politics and the social divides caused by living in a country which has spent the last thirty years seesawing dangerously between Catholicism and Anglicanism, which is absorbing rather than distracting.