Where Rupert Gets No Support

The Stranger Prince by Margaret Irwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I saw a five-star review of this and a one-star review of this and I agreed with them both. I'm going with four stars, because the book pissed me off over and over and yet I liked it quite a bit.

It's a great story, and though she will try your patience, the author writes many amazing scenes, demonstrating a solid grasp of history, politics, the tactics and strategies of war, and the personalities of the various characters (real people) involved. Her writing tends toward the literary at all times, but when she's telling about a cavalry charge in a complex battle scene, the writing is remarkable.

The difficulty, the one that almost made me DNF about 1/3 in, is how her attention jumps from page to page, paragraph to paragraph, and even sentence to sentence. The focus is so scattered and diffuse that the reader has to scramble to keep up with the current topic. It sometimes feels like the novel is restarting again and again, as if everything before was prelude and throat-clearing, and now she's at last talking about the thing she really wanted to get to.

The thing is, I wanted to like it. So rather than DNF, I intentionally, consciously chose to let her tell the story in her distracted, shiny-object, ADHD, mind-wandering way, and though it was a challenge, the storytelling is so complete and satisfying in other ways I found myself really enjoying it.

Prince Rupert was the nephew of Charles I, and grew up on the continent, taking part in the unending wars there during the 17th century even as a teenager. He was well-liked, tall, capable, energetic, and war-like, literally raised to be a leader of men, and when he went to England, his aunt and uncle really took to him. When Parliament, with Puritan support, opposed the king and openly rebelled, Rupert was the king's best general. The story, as told here, was how Rupert was having great success and could have--and should have--won the war for him if only the king would have listened to him and not his detractors. There's a lot of useful history in here, though it feels like Margaret Irwin wanted to tell about Rupert more than what he did or what happened. Hard to say, TBH.

All in all--the author tells a great story and pens a fantastic novel despite having a sometimes frustrating style. I feel like that's fair. YMMV.

Recommended for readers looking to take a chance on books they've never heard of. You never know.

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