Title: Royal Harlot Author: Susan Holloway Scott
Published: July 1, 2007
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 380
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:London, 1660: Ready to throw off a generation of Puritan rule, all England rejoices when Charles Stuart returns to reclaim the throne.
Among those welcoming him is young Barbara Villiers Palmer, a breathtaking Royalist beauty whose sensuality and clever wit instantly captivate the handsome, jaded king. Though each is promised to another, Barbara soon becomes Charles's mistress and closest friend, and the uncrowned queen of his bawdy Restoration court.
Rewarded with titles, land, and jewels, she is the most envied and desired woman in England--and the most powerful. But the role of royal mistress is a precarious one, and Barbara's enemies and rivals are everywhere in the palace.
As a general rule, anything related to the Stuarts isn’t an immediate draw, for one reason or another. Though I read and enjoyed Kathleen Winsor’s seminal Forever Amber, I tend to find the risqué happenings of the Restoration era to be somewhat tedious. So with that in mind, Royal Harlot didn’t scream my name while reading, but I was able to find it entertaining and often interesting all the same.
Barbara Palmer is not a well-liked woman by really anyone, especially by a modern audience. But in writing this, Scott seems to be attempting to color the notorious Countess of Castlemaine in a more human light, as I doubt she could entirely pull off casting Barbara as a likable protagonist. The end result is a book where Lady Castlemaine tells the reader quite a lot about herself and her motivations. Barbara tells us she cares deeply for her children, for instance, though we never see her interact with them on the page beyond their births. I felt that the author was attempting to put a positive spin on events, but couldn’t quite commit to that portrayal.
But don’t get me wrong, I didn’t dislike how Scott dealt with Barbara Palmer’s difficult character. It was simply that I couldn’t exactly discern what angle the author was going for, as sometimes the reader was presented with imcomplete or conflicting ideas. This didn’t really affect my enjoyment of Royal Harlot, but it did bring up some questions about the author’s bias.
Writing-wise, Royal Harlot is well-done, though I think the sex scenes (and there were several, given the protagonist) were overly purple-prosey. Scott had many euphemisms and metaphors that, rather than evoking a passionate encounter between two people, made me laugh.
One area where I was especially disappointed was how Scott seemed to cheat the book out of it’s end. We spend a lot of time with the build-up to Barbara’s first encounter with Charles II, and then a good portion of the book with the years of their relationship. But then all of a sudden, in one chapter, it was over, and then I was reading the author’s afterword. I felt like things had been rushed and not given proper time to develop.
Even with all these things considered, Royal Harlot was still an informative, entertaining historical novel. Scott did a good job of trying to give such a notorious character as Barbara Palmer a balanced portrayal. I think more could have been done with her character, but overall, I was satisfied with the way this book approached history.
