Title: Spider King
Review: The Spider King is one of those exceptions to the rule. I gave up on it after only 45 pages of about 300. It's a "biographical novel" of Louis XI but I didn't manage to stick with the book long enough to actually learn anything new about Louis XI.I knew I was in trouble when I reached chapter two. It was nothing more than an incredibly flowery list of Louis's ancestors, visiting as ghosts as the prince is being born. It was a ham fisted way of introducing a character and the concept of the "divine right of kings."From there the book went on some sort of long winded tangent involving the war with England, various nobles and a child's birth keep secret from his own mother. It didn't help that the book kept throwing characters into the story without any sort of introduction; a dramatis personae or a family tree would have been useful. So after a week of having managed to read all sorts of other books rather than this "biographical novel" I decided to set it aside.
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