A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by E.L. Konigsburg

The story is light and amusing, without shying away from the fact that Eleanor both embodied the feminine ideal of the Middle Ages (and even helped to shape it, through her patronage of Sir Thomas Malory) while simultaneously being thwarted and restrained by the powerlessness of medieval women.

A reader in the 12-14-year-old demographic who hasn’t had much of a background in medieval history will learn a few facts – names and dates and events that perhaps with intrigue her and therefore stick around until such time when she does have a decent class in medieval history. Well, besides reading.)Īs a young adult novel that brings with it a tidy little lesson in history, this book is fine. She looks forward to bringing Henry up to date on the goings-on on earth, since in this version of the afterlife, souls in heaven can watch people on earth, but souls in Purgatory cannot (in spite of the fact that here in OUR Purgatory, we watch people on earth all the time. Eleanor missed feeling hot and being cold. Eleanor is bored: “Even after more than five hundred years in Heaven, Eleanor of Aquitaine still missed quarreling and dressing up. Eleanor is hanging out in heaven with Henry’s mother, Queen Matilda, and various other incorporeal souls, killing time until Henry arrives. The idea is that Eleanor’s erstwhile husband, King Henry II of England, is being released from Purgatory and brought to heaven to be judged.

The novel tells the story of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s life as narrated by Eleanor herself (making this the second novel I read last summer that is narrated by a dead queen) from heaven.

I guess it is worth reading, but I was disappointed anyway, for complicated reasons. In fact, I found this book listed on the curriculum page on the website for the K-8 school that I went to, and since I got a great education there, I thought the book was probably worth reading. Frankweiler quite a lot when I was in the fourth grade or so, and this book came highly recommended for seventh and eighth graders, many of whom I was tutoring at the time. I remember liking Konigsburg’s much-earlier novel From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. I read A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (otherwise known on my to-do list as A Proud Taste for S&M) last summer when I was trying to give myself an introductory course in what’s been published in the world of Middle-Grades and Young Adult fiction since I left those sorts of books behind in the eighth grade or so.

A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver by E.L. Konigsburg