Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks

A Strong and Powerful Lead in Lady Hotspur

Lady Hotspur is the latest novel from the mind of Tessa Gratton, and it has been making waves. This is a telling inspired by Henry IV but with a twist. It’s a gender-bent retelling, with twists, turns, violence, and politics liberally sprinkled throughout.

Three dominant female leads take charge in this novel. Some are fighters. Some are born politicians. All are battling for their side to win, with the crown being the prize (for most). Throw in a f/f romance, and you can see why people have been discussing this novel.

One thing I would like to note before I dive into my review. Lady Hotspur isn’t being advertised as part of the series. That’s a bit strange since it is a direct follow-up to the events in Queens of Innis Lear. You don’t need to read the first one to understand Lady Hotspur (I didn’t). But it would likely significantly increase your appreciation.

Writing

Tessa Gratton’s tale is beautifully written, with complex characters breaking tradition’s molds. Lady Hotspur is more than just a gender-bent retelling of Henry IV, though I can understand and appreciate all of the comparisons made there.

That being said, I have a couple of complaints about this novel. I feel like most of my complaints circle back around to that note I made above. I just lacked an emotional connection to most of these characters, and I imagine if I had read the first half of their story, I would have felt differently about that. So that is perhaps my mistake.

If you’re diving into this story hoping to find lots of politics and war, then you’re lucky because there is so much of that. It feels like each and every character in this novel has their own goal and set of schemes. The level of complexity is something truly inspiring.

Development

Lady Hotspur was admittedly not the fastest-paced novel around. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I would have loved more time spent on character development (as I mentioned above, I wanted to become attached to these characters).

This story starts with a bang in the middle of a battle that demands your attention. But from there, things tend to go up and down, sometimes stalling altogether to focus on something else entirely.

The characters were interesting and did seem to develop over time. I would have loved to see them in their earlier days to make a better comparison there.

Conclusion

I was so unbelievably excited to get my hands on Lady Hotspur. So you can imagine my disappointment when I didn’t love it nearly as much as I had hoped. Maybe it was unfair of me to raise my expectations so high – which may have caused some additional disappointment here because this novel wasn’t bad – not by any means. It just wasn’t as intense or enthralling as I had hoped for.

I still absolutely love the core concept of this novel, as well as the frame from which the main characters were built. I think there’s so much potential in this type of storytelling. I also think that Tessa Gratton is a talented writer, so I don’t want to come off as overly down on her here. The truth is that sometimes a book just doesn’t click with its readers. And that’s what happened to me here.

This review was originally written for Word of the Nerd, but has been ported over to Quirky Cat’s Fat Stacks now that the site has shut down.

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