Recent Reads {The Devil's Queen}

The Devil's Queen: A Novel of Catherine de Medici by Jeanne Kalogridis - Catherine de Medici was not exactly popular, as French queens go.  She came from the influential de Medici family of Florence in a political marriage to the second son of King Francis I of France.  She had a reputation as an extremely intelligent and politically astute woman, but was excluded from governing while her husband, King Henry II was alive. After his death, she had much more influence during the reigns of her sons - sickly Francis II, mad Charles IX, and Henry III, and although she probably had nothing to do with the decision to assassinate leading Huguenots (which led to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre), she was blamed and reviled for it afterwards.  This novelization follows Catherine from her childhood in Florence until shortly after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and imagines the beliefs, actions, and motivations that may have contributed to her nickname "The Serpent Queen"  It is a matter of record that Catherine was a devoted student of astrology, had prophetic dreams, and had a large collection of talismans and a deep interest in magic.  One of her properties had pentacles painted on the floor.  Kalogridis creates a very believable character around what is known about Catherine and her contemporaries, and presents a fiction that could well be true regarding the lengths to which Catherine would go to produce children, protect herself, and guard those she cared about.  The story contains a couple incidents where violence is described in detail that made me wish I hadn't read it right before bed, and a couple of bedroom encounters that are unnecessarily graphic, but other than that I found it an engrossing and thought-provoking novelization.  Usually Catherine de Medici is demonized, and probably with reasonable cause, so a novel from her point of view is rather unique, and put me in a position of sympathizing with a historical character that would normally not receive much sympathy from me.