The World Is Not Enough

Rating:
Summary: This book is special.
Review: I first read this book as a college student 35 years ago and was transported to a fully imagined medieval France. There is a whole world here served up by a respected medieval scholar whose nonfiction works on the Crusades are still in print. I was so glad to see her work show up in print again, long after I had despaired of finding myself another copy. This is not one of those costume dramas where the author dresses up modern personalities in fancy dress. This is an era of mindsets, goals and values different than our own. Before long you adjust to this different way of life. But like our own world and real life everywhere, not all problems get neatly resolved, not all people worthy of love find their soulmates, not all the sons understand their fathers, and not all lost people are found. This for me was one of the most profoundly mind-blowing books I read as a young woman, not just for what it taught me about history but what it taught me about life.
And now years later I find myself teaching World History. Partly because of my experience with this book, I now require my sophomore history students to read a well-researched historical novel as part of the curriculum to give them a better sense of how it was to have lived a life in another time and place. This is the book I suggest to a few gifted readers who are drawn to the medieval period, are not deterred by a thick book and want nothing more than a life-changing read. They too have been transported.

Rating:
Summary: Kudos for historical accuracy. Demerits for readability.
Review: This book has none of the painfully grating anachronisms that mar most historical fictions. Nor does the author fall to the seemingly irresistible urge to view history with contemporary values. If you want to get a feel for the medieval world without reading text books, this isn't a bad place to look. Unfortunately, *I* found the story to be about as readable as a textbook. The author went on and on with character summaries (which made the book painful to get through) yet still somehow managed to have characters which were rather two dimensional. If the author was going to drag on (and on...) about something, I'd have preferred to read more about the medieval world. To heighten the reading difficulty, the storyline is somewhat choppy. 2 stars for readability. 5 stars for true-to-life facts. Since I couldn't give 3.5 stars, I was seriously tempted to give it 3 stars (ie. average) but decided to rounded up to reward historical accuracy.

Rating:
Summary: This is the best historical fiction I have ever read.
Review: This is one of those books that I didn't want to get to the end of. I wanted the story to go on and on. The book brought me back to medieval France and kept me there for 3 weeks. I learned to feel what it was like to be alive back then, and I came to know the characters better than I know myself. The lives these people led were fascinating. A person who wants to experience medieval European adventure, love, pain and daily life would like reading this book. For those interested in historical accuracy, the book is right on. You can go to the Met in NYC to see the armor they wore, and the cities in France that were mentioned were indeed on an important medieval fair route. It also seems to jibe with William Manchester's "A World Lit Only by Fire."