Finished reading on 4/23/11:
THE CONFESSIONS OF CATHERINE DE MEDICI by C. W. Gortner, 2010.
Intriguingly written, well researched, and beautifully realized portrait of one of history's most hated queens. Gortner's Catherine springs to life from these pages, beginning with a violent and uncertain childhood in Florence, Italy, as one of the last of the powerful Medici family. Married off to the French king Francois I's son Henri as a teenager, she is kept relatively in the background for years, looking on and observing the machinations and intrigues of the powerful figures of the dazzling and decadent French court. She is humiliated by her husband's mistress, Diane de Poitiers, but is able to hold her own through her own willpower and her gift as a seer. As queen, she sponsors the famous and enigmatic Nostradamus, whose prophecies give her much trouble and lead to horrendous conclusions in lives of all whom she holds dear. When she is widowed at forty, with young children to care for and a kingdom wracked by religious strife, class struggles and poverty, she manages to take control and drive for peace, even though the course she steers is dangerous and unpopular. Ultimately, Catherine must make terrible decisions and sacrifices in order to save the throne of France for posterity. Gortner does a wonderful job of portraying Catherine as a passionate, conflicted woman, torn between her love for her family and what is best for France. He provides a somewhat different view on Catherine's interest in prophecy and poisons, as well as her relationship with Gaspard Coligny, the Huguenot leader. His descriptions of the fabulous Court of France, with all its luminous notables, gorgeous palaces, plots, intrigues and scandals is brilliantly done, with lots of spice and bite, enjoyable writing all around. He shows more of Catherine's education at court, her relationships with other members of the royal family, her relationship with Francois' mistress Anne de Heilly, and her tangled and often dysfunctional relations with her children. I found this novel enlightening and fascinating because Gortner chose to portray Catherine as a more mult-layered character, rather than simply as the wicked and desperate horror she has generally been shown as, and provides examples trhoughout as to how that reputation began and endured. Gortner's novel and Jeanne Kalogridis' novel The Devil's Queen, have similarities, but Gortner's is probably the more sympathetic of the two and the better written. A very worthwhile piece of historical fiction about an infamous woman.