Fairy tales always promise happy endings: the girl gets the prince, the fancy castle, and the happily-ever-after. In real life, women often face less-than-perfect endings. In her book Doomed Queens, author and illustrator Kris Waldherr writes about fifty women who “met bad ends”, to quote the book’s subtitle. In this blog post, I’ve chosen ten of these women with quite “doomed” endings who particularly caught my interest.
The Sugar Merchant traces the lives of his protagonist Thomas Woodward and his son as they maneuver their ways through the economic and religious turmoil of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe and Asia in a bid to make a good life for themselves and fulfill their personal missions. History readers should enjoy this though the characters in the sequel could be a little more well-developed.
The soaring arches, antiquated books, warm earthen tones, and sheer length of the Long Room in the Old Library building at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland lend it a curios-type environment that sets history- and book-loving hearts aflutter. Learn more about its history!
Most people know H.H. Holmes as the man who built a “murder castle” in Chicago. From there, the tales spiral into tantalizing tendrils of fact and myth, and it’s hard to parse out what is fact and what is fiction. Adam Selzer, in this excellently-crafted biography, helps unravel the H.H. Holmes myth.
Serial killers have existed as long as humanity has. People are fascinated by lurid tales of dastardly deeds performed by depraved individuals. In some cases, the gorier, the better. History tends to focus on male serial killers, such as those named above. Female serial killers exist in history as well, like, for instance, Belle Gunness.
Melanie Clegg writes a highly informative and readable, if not entirely academic, biography on Marie de Guise, Mary Queen of Scots’s’ mother. General readers will most likely find this to be a fascinating first foray into learning about Marie de Guise, especially if one is not familiar with her.