Tanzanite's Castle Full of Books

During my high school and college days in the 1980’s I read a fair number of romance novels – you know, the kind in the 16th-19th century with a heroine with beautiful flowing hair who is in a bad situation and the brooding hero who comes to her rescue. The covers featured lots of heaving bosoms spilling out of a pretty dress and a bare-chested or shirt-open-to-the-navel man with killer abs. They mostly followed a similar plot formula and eventually, I grew bored and quit reading them. When I first read about William Marshall in The Greatest Knight a few years ago I looked around to see what other books might have been written about him and I stumbled on a series of four books written in the 80’s about William and various members of his family. To my wish list they went. I don’t read much historical romance now, but when I needed one for a review over at Royal Reviews, I decided the first book in the series should suffice.


A Shield of Roses is based on the lives of two historical figures – an Irish Princess Eve (Aoife) MacMurrough and Richard de Clare the son of one of England’s most powerful nobles who would later be known as Strongbow. Eve and Richard are the parents of Isabel de Clare, William Marshall’s wife. As the animosity intensifies between Eve’s father (the King of Leinster) and other clans, he sends his daughter to England where he believes she will be safe with the family of Gilbert de Clare (Richard’s uncle). Not long after she begins her journey, Eve runs into trouble and is saved by Richard – of course she has no idea who he is and is shocked when she finds out. From there, the story follows the general 1980’s romance formula – they are attracted to each other but don’t want to admit it and suffer through a series of rather contrived misunderstandings until they both finally see sense and admit they’ve been in love the whole time.

A Shield of Roses is full of the usual historical romance characters - the young ingénue with a fiery temper who talks too much and usually before she thinks and the handsome, chivalrous knight with the patience of a saint who puts up with her. And even though they claim to hate each other, they have great sex - often. Eve has a tendency to find herself in places she shouldn’t be and has to be saved by Richard numerous times. Eve is really TSTL – she’s quite b*tchy most of the time, argumentative, spoiled and childish. There were several times I just wanted to slap her and tell her to grow up already – it’s not always all about her. And after narrowly escaping the clutches of the bad guys a few times you would think she would learn her lesson and not go traipsing around the countryside by herself. But nooooo, even this sort of simple logic seems beyond her grasp.

Despite the rather stereotypical characters and predictable romance plot, I did like reading about some of the history. The author admits that she condensed the events of about twenty years into a much shorter time frame for purposes of telling the story and that she has Richard and Eve meeting long before they really did (which actually is most of the story). Covering the end of the civil war between King Stephen and Matilda through the early years of Henry II’s reign, Eve and Richard have to contend with the politics of the day as they find themselves being used as pawns in England’s desire to conquer Ireland.

I probably would have enjoyed this book more had it not been so predictable in the romance area and had Eve not been so darn annoying and stupid. 

Rating: Average (2.5 Stars for the history)

In case the FTC asks:  I got a copy of this book from Paperback Swap