The King's Secret Matter Book

This is the second book of Eleanor Hibbert's, aka Jean Plaidy, that I've tried, and I have to say, I stop here. The King's Secret Matter is just the same as The Shadow of the Pomegranate, there's no change in style or quality. Plaidy's historical fiction novels seem to be characterised by incredibly dry, unimaginative, dull writing that add nothing to the genre. Historical events are vastly oversimplified or skipped over entirely. Historical personages are reduced to one-dimensional stock caricatures. The book is peppered with obvious and immensely boring info dumps, and the writing is just overall flat and sleep-inducing. There's no attempt at any depth or sophistication, there's nothing that grabs my interest here, it just feels grey and devoid of spark or life. I've read far worse, for sure, I'll give Plaidy that - but at least some of those truly terrible books held my attention by being so bad that they were absurdly funny. Plaidy's novels are about as enjoyable as eating shredded cardboard instead of cereal in your morning milk - and they're far from memorable. They provide only the absolute basics of events - if this hadn't been published in 1962, I'd almost think that Plaidy had spent ten minutes on Wikipedia in research time, maximum, before sitting down and churning out a manuscript in a day or two, her works are really that sketchy and loose, offering only the basic facts, regurgitated as simplistic narrative but offering nothing more. It just doesn't have life or imagination at all, and what little story it has is thinly sketched at best. I'm done with Jean Plaidy as an author. Again, nothing against the late author personally, and I have definitely read far worse, but I just find Plaidy's writing so dull and lifeless, I'm not motivated to ever pick up one of her books again. I gave it two books to draw me in, and I'm finished - Plaidy's just not my cup of tea.

3 out of 10.