ARC Review: The Medievalist

The Medievalist by Anne-Marie Lacy

Genre: Historical Fiction, Time-slip, Romance

Rating: 7/10

Expected Publication Date: Oct 31st 2017

"I nodded, pretending to agree with him, but it was too cold and unforgiving to be beautiful."

The Medievalist is a time-slip novel, featuring a historian who gets what every historian secretly dreams of-- she gets to go back in time and meet the man she has studied for years: Richard III. (If you have no clue who that was, never fear, neither did I!) She is ripped out of the twenty first century and wakes up surrounded by the mostly gritty sometimes beautiful trappings of the 1400s. 

The Medievalist is a good novel, featuring a well-researched plot line, and a main character who grows and learns as the novel progresses. Character development might sound like a given, but believe me, it is not. A couple reviews ago, I complained about the romanticized version of the past in The Secret. The Medievalist does not suffer from this fault; it does not shy away from the dangers that women faced in this time period. Women could gain status from birth, marriage, or being the mistress of a powerful man, but without men, for the most part, they lacked power and protection. Jayne is thrown from a world of academia, into a cut-throat world where she must decide what she is willing to do for that protection. 

The chapters oscillate from being told from Jayne's perspective to King Richard's perspective-- something that I could have done without. The Jayne chapters were written well, but Richard's suffered from a stilted voice that never quite sounded right. 

Parts of this novel dragged, and sometimes I couldn't convince myself to care about the plight of the characters. However, parts of the novel flew by as I flipped the pages, eager to find out what happened next. Inconsistency, and the 'romance' kept this novel from being better. The author wrote lust better than she wrote love, which left me with two characters who did not have any reason to love each other-- there had been no time or space for a relationship to develop-- so lust was thrown in as a proxy.

I don't know much about the 1400s, but this novel felt well researched and believable-- which you kind of have to do if you make your main character a historian whose area of research was the 1400s. That being said, I might have enjoyed this novel more if I knew anything about King Richard III before going in. Even so, I was never overly confused about the political intrigue.

The Medievalist was a good--not great, but enjoyable, novel that fans of the time-slip genre should try. If you enjoy well researched historical fiction, then you might like The Medievalist.

What about you? Have you read the Medievalist? What is your favorite time-slip novel??