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** spoiler alert ** very almost 5 stars -- only slightly infected with modern cultural revisionism virus (not the kindly best friend lesbian!) and sentimental epiloguitis

my netgalley review:

Loved this so much. It's really more of a 4.5 than a 5, because I had a few minor critiques (more in a bit), but I would absolutely recommend this to any students of historical fiction and probably to most other readers as well. The Hilary Mantel comparisons are apt, though I have to say that I enjoyed this much more than Wolf Hall -- John/Lambert/Edward/Simnel is to me a more compelling character than Mantel's Cromwell, and I found Harkin's prose more dynamic and more pleasurable.

The Simnel tale is a great story and a wise choice for a historical novel -- there's enough structure in the historical record to give this book a sense of solidity and significance, but not so much as to hinder invention and flexibility with character. We meet many interesting people, only some of whom were familiar to me from Shakespeare and my knowledge of this period, and nearly all of which interested me and sparked my sympathies. Speaking of which, I would really have loved this book to have a historical afterward or a set of author's notes about who was invented and who appears in the historical record. Characters like Joan Fitzgerald, who did exist but is, historically speaking, a footnote, were distracting to me -- I constantly felt the urge to look her up and figure out what was true about her and what was invented (when did she really die?). Maybe this won't be a problem for other readers, and honestly it was hardly one for me -- but I would have very happily read a page or two about her, what is known and what was embroidered, and why Harkin chose her to be the focus of so much of the book. (This goes for lots of other figures too!)

A few little things I didn't like so much. I found the naming confusing at times. Of the characters I'm familiar with from history, some are referred to with their first names -- typically women, children, and kings -- others with their titles, and still others with their last names. That's fine -- that accords with historical convention, and has to do with status and rank. Where it seemed unusual was with characters who were supposedly intimate or closely related to each other. Should Margaret Beaufort really call the Duke of Clarence by his title rather than his name, George? Should J/L/E/S, his purported son, think of him that way? Should Lincoln still be Lincoln, even once he becomes J/L/E/S's most beloved cousin? Doesn't anyone think of themselves as a Plantagenet, or use that name? Not that any of that really matters! Overall, Harkin does a remarkably good job of helping us remember who is who, and giving people their titles instead of their names often helps with that -- Lincoln is otherwise just another John de la Pole, after all. But I was frequently distracted by these choices and wondered why they had been made.

Secondly, this book is too long. Personally, I would cut some of the epilogue, which goes on for a while and doesn't give us much except more time to doubt the somewhat too good to be true friendly lesbian found family setup (is that in any way based in the historical record? I'd love to know). But the problem is more entrenched than that. The book is primarily composed of habitual time. The rare scenes, when we do get them, are always exciting and smartly paced. But they're often lodged in quite a lot of generality, telling us how J/L/E/S is feeling at any given point, what he's worried about, how he's changed from some point in the past, what the castle he's living in is like, etc. There's some pleasure in these passages, of course -- as I've said, I really like Harkin's prose. But there's just no reason this book should be nearly 500 pages instead of, say, 350.

And thirdly, at times, the humor feels too modern, and there's too much of it (classic peasant!). There are a lot of funny people in The Pretender, and without exception I enjoyed them -- especially Kildare (who I was loath to turn against), Jennott, and Joan. But many of them are funny in the same way, and put together they posed a challenge to my immersion and otherwise pretty solid sense of historicity. I could really feel the book working to keep itself from falling into a The Great style bawdiness -- and a few times it slipped.

Similarly (and maybe I'm totally wrong about this -- again, a problem an afterword could solve), I was suspicious of J/L/E/S's organically discovered feminist thinking and of his convenient and friendly and quite evolved lesbian BFF. Those features felt like little 2024 intrusions, tiny anxious efforts to keep us caring about and liking a protagonist who is, at worst, a creature of his time -- efforts I felt were unnecessary and, say it with me, distracting.

Despite all that, I want to reiterate that I really really liked this book. It's one of the best new historical novels I've read in years, and maybe the best of the past decade period. I'm mentioning all these critiques because they're really the only things I didn't like about The Pretender, and they're minor. Can't wait for this to come out -- I definitely want a copy for my shelf.

arc provided by netgalley in exchange for an honest review