Lady Hotspur

By Tessa Gratton

Tessa Gratton's latest epic adult fantasy, Lady Hotspur, is a sweeping, heart-stopping Shakespearean novel of betrayal and battlefields and destiny.

STRIKE FAST, LOVE HARD, LIVE FOREVER

This is the motto of the Lady Knights – sworn to fealty under a struggling kingdom, promised to defend the prospective heir, Banna Mora.

But when a fearsome rebellion overthrows the throne, Mora is faced with an agonizing choice: give up everything she's been raised to love, and allow a king-killer to be rewarded – or retake the throne, and take up arms against the newest heir, Hal Bolingbrooke, Mora's own childhood best friend and sworn head of the Lady Knights.

Hal loathes being a Prince; she's much more comfortable instated on the Throne of Misrule, a racous underground nether-court where passion rules all. She yearns to live up to the wishes of everyone she loves best – but that means sacrificing her own heart, and so she will disappoint everyone until the moment she can rise to prove those expectations wrong.

And between these two fierce Princes is the woman who will decide all their fates – Lady Isarna Hotspur, the fiery and bold knight whose support will turn the tides of the coming war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Jan 9, 2020
• ISBN: 9780008281953

Tessa Gratton

TESSA GRATTON is the author of adult SFF titles The Queens of Innis Lear and Lady Hotspur from Tor Books, as well as the original fairy tales Strange Grace and Night Shine from McElderry Books. Her YA series and short stories have been translated into twenty-two languages. Though she has lived all over the world, she currently resides alongside the Kansas prairie with her wife.

Reviews for Lady Hotspur

[jsabrina-219220 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like its predecessor, "The Queens of Innis Lear," "Lady Hotspur" is a rich and satisfying novel *very* loosely based on stories best known from Shakespeare.

In Gratton's re-telling of the tale, Shakespeare's Prince Henry "Hal" Bolingbroke is re-cast as the female Celadia Bolingbroke who -- for reasons that are never really explained, goes by the nickname of "Hal." Harry "Hotspur" Percy is now Isarna Percy. Instead of being strangers, they are best friends and knights, along with Banna Mora, the female heir to the throne of Armoreia. The usurpation of King Rossavos by Hal's mother -- the exiled Bolingbroke -- removes Mora from the line of succession and places Hal there. A prophecy from Innis Lear about "The lion, the wolf, and the dragon" places the three women under a shadow of future strife.

Like Shakespeare's Prince Hal, this Hal is a "Prince of Riot," but unlike Shakespeare's character her riot is an expression of her inner turmoil not a deliberate masquerade. And this Hal and Hotspur fall deeply, desperately in love.

When Banna Mora loses a battle and is taken hostage by the forces of Innis Lear, she finds a surprising new home, family, and vision, leading -- after hundreds of pages -- to a final battle and a wild act of magic which will re-make both countries.

I enjoyed this book a great deal, despite a few slow spots, but I kept wondering why Gratton once again felt it necessary to clearly and deliberately invoke Shakespeare when she could have told these stories without those resonances. Like so many re-told Arthurian tales, these characters are so different, and the events so far from those of the "canon" that there doesn't seem to be any point to it. This isn't a peek into the minds and hearts of Shakespeare's characters, these are completely new stories. One doesn't need Shakespeare to invoke the themes of royal legitmacy, "the deaths of kings," ambition, friendship, loyalty, and magic.

This Hal and Hotspur have nothing to do with Shakespeare's characters, and deserved their own names and their own story. Ironically, that is also one of the themes of the work: who defines a person's story.

Although this book could conceivably stand alone, I strongly recommend reading "The Queens of Innis Lear" first, because so much of the culture of Innis Lear and the magic which overtakes the three heroines is explained much more deeply in the first book, and the actions and histories of several of those characters reverberate in this one.

[wyvernfriend · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Part of the Queens of Innis Lear duology. It takes inspiration from another Shakespeare play (and yet another one that I'm not familiar with) but knowledge isn't really necessary - though now I want to read boith plays. THis is a gender-changed version, Hal Bollingbrooke and Hotspur are both female and Banna Mora too. It's several generations after the events of The Queens and the characters of the first are more legend than real people.Banna Mora has joined a rebellion that deposes the king and leaves Hal Bollingbrooke the next heir, she's reluctant and wants nothing more than Lady Hotspur Percy. Theres a lot of marriages for dynastic reasons and breaking of hearts but the ending felt right and felt like a winding up of the series. I also like how the different lives wind around each other. Like Queens it's a dense read and needed my attention. While I had started this before reading book 1 the world didn't make as much sense without reading the first. I suspect you could read this one without reading the first but it worked for me this way. It as adsorbing and interesting. I could also see how it could not be some people's jam.