Born in the Purple by Dora IlievaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is the sort of historical fiction that I enjoy reading most of all. It is packed with all kinds of intriguing historical facts and figures from a time and place of which I knew very little, Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire in the 11th and 12th century. Most importantly it is very well written with plausible conversations between the main characters: Anna Komnena; her siblings; her mother, the Empress; her father, the Emperor; and various patriarchs of the Orthodox Church including, most significantly, Leo the Deacon. The reader is kept in suspense all the way in a book that could also be described as a romantic thriller. There is the political conflict between the Church and Alexios, the Emperor, which is half-expected; but the deeply felt disagreements that exist for Anna, simply because she is a woman, captured the heart and mind of this reader from the very beginning.
The story is told through the main characters involved with the imperial royalty and Constantinople, but in particular through Anna, a strong, intelligent but loyal woman. Her problems arise because she is a woman who finds it very difficult to obey the expectations of the mores of the court and the church. She wishes to be a physician and writer of history when all of the men around her, as well as her grandmother, demand that she marries and has children. Like all the rulers of the world for many centuries she is expected to supply a male successor to the crown. The author provides compelling and realistic romance in this dramatic tale, with beautiful and heart-warming complications that persist until the denouement.
My only criticism would be the odd word or phrase that jumped out at me because it was too contemporary, and a modern idiom like ‘okay’. Notwithstanding that Born in the Purple is a book I heartily recommend to lovers of the historical novel.
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