In subject matter. It might also be in marketing, I don't know, I read three of these novels because sonetka's reviews had made me curious, but what they have in common, other than the era they're set in, is the first person narration and the fact they are about and narrated by teenage girls.

Detour rambling: mind you, authors who are definitely billed as Weighty Bestseller Writers employ first person narrators as well, independent from whether their main character is male or female. Mika Waltari did it all those decades ago, Philippa Gregory can't stop doing it right now. Mostly, and there are always exceptions, I prefer third person in my historical narrative. This is because few authors can pull off a first person voice which strikes me as plausibly that of a character from era X. Also if you've read more than one novel from a first person addicted author, the voices in question usually resemble each other too much, independent from which time the characters hail from. (Which is, btw, why I think Waltari pulled it off in The Egyptian, but then his narrators from Neronian Rome or the Finnish middle ages also sound very much like aged Sinuhe, and my suspension of disbelief is broken. Otoh Jo Graham gets away with it regularly, not least because her first person narrators actually are meant to be the same character, born into different eras. Someone who for my taste created a plausible first person narrator in the Tudor era is C.J. Sansom in the Shardlake series, but maybe if I would read a novel of his set in another era and it would also be first person, I would feel differently.

Anyway: Katherine Longshore, who wrote the trilogy (of sorts) I'm about to review, isn't a writer in the Sansom class who manages to give you a strong sense of era through the various levels of Tudor society, or of the ideological clashes. Her novels all take place in the claustrophic court world, and her narrators don't hold values or positions which completely clash with a present day reader. Romance and self realisation are the two main red threads. But I enjoyed reading all three books, though in varying degrees. They're vividly written - süffig, we'd say in German, for which there is no adequate English translation, but the word associates a good drink -, and even within the overcrowded (by novels) Tudor era, they manage to feel individual, not derivative of the dozens of predecessors. They manage to bring the characters they feature to life. While they're losely connected, you can read each on its own. They also don't take place in chronological order. On the contrary, the first one is the last one in terms of Tudor chronology. Which finally brings me to the actual books.

1.) Gilt: Our first person narrator is Katherine "Kitty" Tilney, who grows up with Catherine "Cat" Howard (given the overabundance of Katherines, a historical novelist always has to come up with short versions and nicknames; these are Longshore's) and ends up witnessing her execution. This is the book I liked least of the three, for one particular reason: structure-wise, it reminded me too much of The Other Boleyn Girl - goodnatured, kind female narrator is endlessly exploited by ruthless ambitious other female main character, who rises and then falls mostly due to own deeds. Our heroine, as opposed to our villainess able to see the shallowness and destructiveness of ambition and court life, at the end finally is free of same and can have a self determined existence.

This is definitely one of the most negative takes on Katherine Howard I've come across. (Most fictional takes on Henry VIII.'s fifth queen have her as a good natured, if somewhat stupid teenager, with the exception of Ford Maddox Ford who made her into a Catholic saint.) She's basically a High School mean girl: manipulative, shallow, cruel, demanding loyalty without ever giving it. Even when she does something historically seen as generous (pleading for the incarcarated Thomas Wyatt, who is at the point of her wedding enjoying another stint in the Tower), she does so for self aggrandizement. Now the mean girl characterisation is just as possible as the goodnatured one in terms of the historical foundation (i.e. we don't know; certainly the mutual blaming each other once Katherine Howard, her servants, and her former and current lover were arrested could be due to understandable panic in the face of a gruesome death, or it could say something about their characters - who are we to tell?), but the problem is that the Kitty and Cat relationship is the central one in the novel. Everyone keeps telling Kitty that Cat is just using her, but it takes her eons to catch on. And we're still supposed to buy into a deep bond between them after Cat's fall, which makes Kitty be there for her in the night before her death, when all the previous novel has shown Cat in such a relentlessly negative light. This just doesn't work for me. More ambiguity in Cat and some truly positive actions which make it understandable why Kitty still loves her, and I'd been sold.

Why do I still think the novel is worth reading instead of skipping over? Because it (and the subsequent novels) have the most fleshed out, interesting Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, of any Tudor era novel so far. We're definitely talking post Julia Fox Jane characterisation, without Jane suddenly becoming a saint (impossible anyway in a novel dealing with the Katherine Howard era). Seen through Kitty Tilney's eyes, Jane is basically a Tudor noir character, an enigmatic woman with a past who is a riddle Kitty can't quite solve. She clearly had strong feelings for the dead Anne, and Kitty at one point speculates that Jane in her relationship with Cat and the other young girls is trying to recapture her youth, but then again, after the fall, Jane at one point says to Kitty "What makes you think this (death) isn't exactly what I deserve?" In the end, Jane comes across as better than Cat who immediately tries to use her as a scapegoat once all is discovered, and Kitty's sympathies are with her. The hints about Jane's and Anne's relationship are enough to make one very curious about the next novel, which is:

2.) Tarnish: this one has a young Anne Boleyn, just returned from France and new at the English Court, as the narrator. And because it's Anne Boleyn in her late teenage years, the arc of the other two, with our heroines realising the destructiveness of ambition and court life, is unthinkable. Also, the romance outcome is the exact reverse from what it would be in your avarage YA novel. Anne in this novel has two main love interests, King Henry, whom she has a long term so far unrequited crush on, and Thomas Wyatt, whom she developes the verbal-sparring-of-equals relationship with, which in a novel dealing with not rl characters would lead to Anne leaving her crush on the King behind and embracing true love in the form of Wyatt. Not here, of course, though she gets out of the crush stage with Henry and does realize she's in love with Wyatt, but Anne, with an YA unusual form of ambition, concludes that with two married suitors and one of them the King hinting that he's willing to do the hitherto unthinkable and separate from his Queen, she's going to go with the more powerful option.

(The novel's Henry VIII., btw, is a neat exercise in reader foreshadowing, leaving aside that Longshore already presented us with the bloated, more quickly lethal version in the previous novel, as well as the assumption your avarage reader has avarage historical knowledge. You can see why Anne, especially given she's grown up in a society glorifying him, has her original crush, while at the same time the way he's paralleled with his sister Mary, who in her casual cruelty is the closest thing the novel has to a villain, foreshadows what will happen.)

(Another unusual thing for romance-heavy novels: Anne's relationship with Henry Percy, which in this version isn't youthful True Love but both of them wanting to escape an unwanted marriage and seeing each other as the solution to this - and in Anne's case seeing Henry Percy as a social climbing -, rushing into a relationship and then realising there's no there there. Which comes with awkward first time sex. Usually romantic heroines either have blissful sex with their true love, or unwanted painful sex with an arranged husband. Awkward wanted sex with not-really-true-love makes for a refreshing change.)

The novel also has a strong emphasis on the relationships between the Boleyn siblings, and here you can see the author improving in terms of the previous novel. Anne, who hasn't seen her sister and brother for years, makes some basic assumptions about them which turn out to be mistaken (or only scratching the surface), but she doesn't come across as blind the way Kitty does in the previous novel re: Cat, not least because neither Mary nor George are presented as villains. (Though this is one of the darker Georges; one of the things Anne at the start is puzzled and hurt is why their early childhood closeness before she went to France can't be recaptured and George behaves in a jerkish way to her. There is an explanation - and no, it's not incest -, and misunderstandings are cleared up, but George still is one of the edgier versions around, though miles from the Tudors rapist or Mantel's spineless fool.)

And, as mentioned: Jane (Parker) as she is then. Longshore uses Fox' research re: Jane Parker being present and involved in the early court life of Anne Boleyn to great effect; her version is a nail-biting, intense girl who forms a loners' friendship with pre-popularity Anne, but with more than one reason (and Anne is blind to the obvious other one at first), and there's also a basis for both Jane's capacity for passionate attachment and her fear of being at odds with power. She's plausible as a younger version of the woman from Gilt and goes some ways to explain the enigma without explaining it all.

Anne going from newcomer and somewhat ridiculed outsider at court to trendsetting new favourite comes with the usual finding-yourself-arc of a young heroine but also with historical irony, due to the reader's awareness what her triumph at the end will result in. It also comes with strengthened relationships to her siblings and to Jane, though, and a wistful road-not-taken one with Wyatt, and all in all, it makes Tarnish my favourite of the three novels.

Brazen: features an older Anne a few years later, just after Elizabeth's birth, as a supporting character, but our first person narrator is another teenage girl: Anne's first cousin Mary Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, who gets married to Henry VIII.'s illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. Another Henry, as viewers and readers of Blood Ties know. Here, he's Fitz. They're not, however, allowed to consume their marriage just yet, supposedly because Henry VIII. thought teenage sex was responsible for his brother Arthur's early demise. I kid you not. This is so preposterous that I looked it up, and yes, Henry VIII. actually gave that as a reason. Mind you, the novel allows characters to point a far more likely reason for the royal non-consummation order: this way, the marriage could easily be dissolved, should Henry VIII. want or need to marry his illegitimate son to someone else. If he had legitimized him - not impossible, given he had made both his daughters illegitimate -, then, for example, it would have been very likely that he'd sought a royal bride for Fitz.

Anyway, being forbidden to have sex of course makes for the obvious arranged-couple-falling-in-love-and-yearning-for-each-other plot. But Mary also has other things going on her life; as ever, Longshore is good with the friendships (Mary with Madge Shelton and Margaret Douglass; together, they create the Devonshire Manuscript) and the family relationships, which with the Howards are even more dysfunctional than they are with their Boleyn relations. (Mary's parents have a marriage to spectacularly bad - historical fact, btw, we have the Duchess' of Norfolk's letters to prove it - that it arguably outdoes Henry VIII.'s marriages in that department, minus the part where he killed two wives.) Mary's brother and Fitz' best friend, Hal (Earl of Surrey, poet, destined to be executed a few years after this novel) is another important supporting character.

Early on, Mary has a romantic view on the Henry VIII. and Anne marriage but gets rapidly disillusioned. One of the novels twists is that while remamining an Anne supporter, Mary inadvertendly contributes to her fall when she thinks Cromwell is interrogating her about her friend Margaret Douglass' secret marriage (Margaret being the King's niece, this one was illegal and did indeed earn Margaret a stint in the Tower later) and tries to distract him with in itself harmless talk which Cromwell later uses fatally against Anne. Btw, this Cromwell is certainly of the villanous kind, though the uncontested prize for main male villain (other than Henry VIII.) in this novel goes to Mary's father, the Duke of Norfolk. (I've yet to read a positive characterisation of him in any novel, no matter whom the author prefers. Which isn't surprising. He scorned books and new ideas, abandoned the nieces he first pimped at the first sight of trouble and abused his wife.) (Mind you, somewhere I'm sure there is a Misunderstood Woobie!version of Norfolk. There is of everyone else...) Who ends the novel frustrated when a grown up, sadder and wiser Mary who after Fitz has become a vampire has died young refuses to be his instrument and continues her own life at her own conditions. (Which as a Duke's widow she can now afford.) But he swears he'll find another Howard girl to bring to the King, and thus the circle to the first novel is closed. It is also for Jane, who in this novel makes only a few appearances but at the end as opposed to Mary returns to court because she can't imagine another existence but serving a queen, and thus dooms herself. The relative lack of Jane after her two strong and intriguing appearances in earlier novels is a let down only if you've read the other two, but it makes sense given Mary would have had only limited contact with her.

All in all: not must reads, but if you feel like consuming three novels about women in the Tudor age which offer interesting non-romantic relationships along with the romances, these would be a good choice.