The Creation of Eve by Lynn Cullen

I finished The Creation of Eve by Lynn Cullen. 378 pages!

It was a very interesting book. It was written about one of the first female painters in the 1500's...she came to be on the Queen of Spain's court and served her.

It is a work of fiction deeply rooted in truth. The characters and time line are all real, the dialog and story probably mostly false. It gave me a glimpse of what life was like for women in that time. They were to be seen and not heard, mostly only good for breeding. Also the insane medical practices! Bleeding people and stuff. I cannot imagine.

Reading the Authors Note puts me at 390 pages!

Review-

I would give it 3.5 stars. It was well written and though a lot of true history was wove into it it did not read like a non-fiction history novel. It jumped around a long amongst time and toward the end it sort of fell apart for me. I don't feel there was enough character development so I never really felt a pull toward any one character. Their emotions were grazed over but never really anything in depth. But since it was told in diary form I sort of expect that because women were really trained to hide their feelings so in that sense it stayed very true to the era.

The author spoke more on the people rather than wasting time on descriptive word pictures which i appreciate...nothing bores me more then when an author sits there and describes the blades of grass. Considering the diary was supposed to have been written by an artist I was surprised.

I did enjoy it though, if you are interested in history of that time period then it would probably interest you too. Many of the things that were spoken of as 'common practice' really shocked me. The 3rd queen of Spain was only 14 when the King took her as a wife! FOURTEEN!! And it was a 'bad thing' that he waited until after she started her period (or 'courses' as they called it) to sleep with her!

Ooooh, and in this novel it was rumored that the king poisoned his 3rd wife. That's crazy to me...also the number of people afflicted by syphilis, of course they had no idea what it was back then...they called it The French Disease or the Spanish Disease depending on where they were from (always blaming the other country, ha) It would be passed on to the baby during birth...sooo sad no wonder they died so soon. Especially women.