Book Giveaway! – And The Book That Changed My Life

I am about to retreat into Copyedit Cave, but I’d love to give away a few books first, and maybe discuss my profound love for the Novel That Changed My Life.

For just the book giveaway, scroll down until you see the pictures! In the meantime, I’ll discuss:

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE





It happened in seventh grade. My sister must’ve been home from school on vacation, because she’d left one of her novels in the bathroom. I picked it up to idle away some time while, you know, being in the bathroom, and started reading.

The first sentence was, “He was a small rat, but bolder than most, with a disproportionately long tail which curled behind him on the stone floor, losing itself in the half-gloom of a solitary candle’s light.” The prologue of the book goes on to focus upon the girl, Elizabeth Tudor, who is sitting in the Tower of London, waiting for the moment her sister, the queen, signs her death warrant.

The book went on to change my life.

Before reading Susan Kay’s LEGACY, I had little to no interest in history . It’s not that I was lacking completely in intellectual curiosity, it’s more that I was in seventh grade and it hadn’t really awoken yet. Besides, the Tudors were my sister’s thing. (And it really was. She had all these cutouts of Holbein paintings, including Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth, Henry VIII, etc., and her much-anticipated Christmas present one year was even a lute.)

I read the entire prologue in the bathroom, then I took the book with me and spent the next two days devouring it. It was just the beginning. For years afterward, throughout high school and college, I burned through a massive number of novels focusing on Elizabeth, on the Tudors, on various figures from the Tudor era. My sister had accumulated a number of non-fiction books about the era, too, which I gleefully pilfered.

In high school, I studied voraciously in any class that focused on that era. In college, I went on to major in European History, and did a couple independent study projects focused on that same stuff. I probably re-read LEGACY fifteen to twenty times throughout these years. I studied abroad for a year in Scotland… Er, yes, it wasn’t England, but I was in Edinburgh, where Elizabeth’s nemesis, Mary Queen of Scots, lived and reigned for a few short years– so it was sort of relevant.

But I didn’t just gain an interest in Tudor history from LEGACY. My fascination evolved over time. From Tudor history, it roved to European history in general… the manipulations of Otto von Bismarck, the heroes and villains of World War II, all about the Battle of Stalingrad, the stories of Robespierre and The Terror in Revolutionary France…

In short, I credit LEGACY with awakening in me a thirst to learn about the origins of the society I lived in.

The novel was recently re-released by Sourcebooks, so I bought it again. I can read LEGACY a bit more objectively nowadays. I’ll acknowledge that the book has flaws. There’s a bit more romance than I appreciate, and there’s some serious Scarlett O’Hara-esque manipulative-female-adored-by-men stuff going on. Many of her nemeses, including Mary Queen of Scots, and her rival for Robert Dudley, Lettice Knollys, are portrayed as slightly two-dimensional– an especially glaring problem when a story is told in third person omniscient.

But I still maintain that it’s one of the most fascinating psychological portraits of a character I’ve ever read. The main character, Elizabeth, is perhaps the definition of a flawed protagonist. She’s shockingly brilliant, but completely unforgiving. She has a keen understanding of the needs of her people, yet she’s utterly selfish and vain– and utterly unapologetic about it. See this snippet:

“Is there anything you cannot do?” he asked her at length, stung to a jealous awareness of inferiority.

[Elizabeth] smiled demurely.

“I can’t swim, Your Highness.”

“If you ever learn,” he said softly, “I shall kill you for it.”

His command of English was still uncertain. It was quite possible he had misused the word. But as she stared into his steady eyes she knew he meant exactly what he said and was amused by the knowledge. After that, she went out of her way to flaunt her talents and charms.

p221

I can’t be the only one who finds that exchange and her subsequent face-rubbing of it so wonderful?

The Elizabeth of LEGACY is spiteful, she’ll lie freely to preserve herself, and as much as she loves certain people, she would destroy them in a minute to preserve her power. This is a real portrayal of a Renaissance Queen. That ruthlessness is so unromanticized, I love Susan Kay for it.

Her thoughts at one point regarding her love interest:

“Men like Robin were never content, and men like Robin were all she would ever love, grasping, ambitious reflections of herself… He would begin to plot and scheme behind her back, building up a court faction… To emerge from that final conflict as the victor, it would be necessary to kill him. And she knew she was capable of doing it– it was as simple as that.” 296

And the greatest part about all these character flaws? The author is completely in control of them. They are not unintentional flaws she tries to disguise, as can be seen in many Mary Sue or wish-fulfillment type stories where the protagonist is too perfect. She writes Elizabeth as a dark, twisted person with a noble and compelling side, and the characters around her are aware of it:

“He saw the Queen and saw her for the first time with the mask of friendship removed, a figure suddenly as ruthless and terrible as ever her father had been… All their dazzling intimacy was an illusion, a mere straw in the wind, for in the last resort he was but a subject, as her mother had been.” 305

Last but not least, this book made me want to be a writer. Years ago, I started pondering the idea of writing some great Tudor epic of my own. In the time since, my writing has taken a very different direction– futuristic YA. But still, in tribute to author Susan Kay, and LEGACY, I’m giving someone a copy of this book, along with several other YA and adult titles while I’m at it.

This brings me to….

Winners will be notified via e-mail on August 18th! I’m just doing the names-in-a-hat thing. The books up for grabs are:

And lest I forget…



TO ENTER…

Fill out this form to enter. This automatically sticks your name in the hat. You can increase your likelihood of winning by:

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