Sunday, March 24, 2013

Queen Jezebel-Jean Plaidy

Queen Jezebel


Jean Plaidy

Touchstone, Mar 12 2013, $16.00

ISBN: 978-1451686548



Catherine de' Medici and her young son King Charles want to end the hostility between the Catholics and Huguenots that is destroying France. Thus Catherine arranges a marriage of convenience between her reluctant twenty-something Catholic daughter Margot and the Huguenot King Henry of Navarre in an attempt to end the violence. They wed in Paris; however, the marriage fails to bring about the peace that King Charles desperately wants. Catherine, realizing that her control over her royal offspring is vanishing, convinces him that the Huguenots plan to assassinate him. King Charles authorizes religious cleansing to rid the kingdom of the “pestilential Huguenots forever” while the heretics celebrate the wedding.



The reprint of the third Catherine De' Medici biographical fiction (see This Italian Woman and Madame Serpent) is an engaging historical that showcases the manipulative protagonist involvement in the late sixteenth century French religious civil war. The entertaining storyline paints a diabolical dangerous Catherine manipulating her children, but fails to fully paint the background of two strictly rigid (in their Godly beliefs) religious combatants. Still aptly titled Queen Jezebel is an enjoyable finish to the De' Medici trilogy.



Harriet Klausner

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