Lady Clementine by Marie BenedictMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I've read several of Marie Benedict's historical fiction books and after I finished The Only Woman in the Room, I decided I wasn't going to read any more of her books. They aren't horrible, but they get tedious especially, when the main character is in dialogue with others and the dialogue doesn't ring true to the character or the times. Robust editing could have made a difference, but...
In any case, my book club voted on Lady Clementine for our August choice. Since I hate when one member holds an entire group hostage because she refuses to read a particular author or genre, I sucked it up and agreed with the choice. Wonder of all wonders - I liked this book the best of the Benedict books I've read!
Clementine Churchill is an extremely interesting person and that probably helped a lot when telling her story. There is also a lot of documentation from which to draw, so much of the meat of the story was already established. She truly was a woman with ideas before their time, a force of nature in her own right, and Winston Churchill's equal.
After reading the book I started looking into Clementine Churchill and she was everything the author described. The beginning of the book had more of the internal monologues than the remainder of the book. These are when the author is at her weakest. I understand this is historical fiction, but I lose faith in a storyteller when too many assumptions are made, especially when "recounting" private thoughts, conversations, and motivations. There were fewer of these moments in the second half of the book, and I liked the second half better.
I hope this means that the author or the editing is getting better and not that Clementine is such an interesting person it doesn't take much to write an engaging book about her.
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