The Daughter of Time

⚖The case for it

A Scotland Yard inspector is flat on his back in hospital with nobody to chase, so he takes on a five-hundred-year-old case by cross-examining documents, which one critic describes as a book where “the detective is in (and becomes) the locked room.” Doing history becomes the detective work: weighing primary sources against the textbook version, asking who wrote a thing down and what they wanted from it. The nurses and Marta and the American research assistant keep the sickroom funny. Readers arrive mildly curious and leave hunting further reading, saying the book “moves along faster than a hospital bed on greased wheels.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The middle is a march through the York and Lancaster family tree that readers describe as “like a long history class.” Everyone around the bed talks in the same dry register, which is why one review runs “Characterization? Non-existent. Style? Themes? Nothing.” The book wants to be an argument and a novel and lands short of both, missing the “Footnotes. Citations. Academic explanations.” that scholarship needs while lacking scene-driven momentum. Grant’s reasoning also looks decided in advance, with the opposing case given token room. The medieval Edwards and Richards and Henrys pile up until “couldn’t one be called Rich?”

— the honest librarian

4h

honest hours

6

sittings