The Barbarian Princess

by Laura Buchanan and Florence King

Book by Florence King, Laura Buchanan This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0425037010
• ISBN13: 9780425037010
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Berkley Publishing Group
• Length: 410 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The greatest romance novel ever written

This is the greatest "bodice ripper" romance ever written, the height of genre writing for the field, and criminally neglected. For this work is far beyond the "Saxon sex" yarn of soft-core porn to appeal to the Marge Simpson habitudes of the K-Mart paperback rack. Laura Buchanan (pseudonym of polymath humorist Florence King) deftly constructs a fabulous world and weaves a wonderful story filled with excellent historical detail and famous classical personages. And it is all funny as hell. But Buchanan never breaks character, and so the tale reads on so many multiple levels of excellence of its type, stereotype, and self parody of the genre, that one must read it several times to even begin to appreciate its full dimensions. Highlights include the heroine staying as an unwelcome refuge amidst misogynist Christian ascetics, and the appearance of Hypatia. Hypatia's welcome cameo perhaps is the only unfunny portion of the book, for Buchanan (King) correctly details her horrible death: an historic injustice to knowledge and truth, as well as to the woman Hypatia herself. The work concludes with an allusion to strawberry blonds being the genetic result of a mixture of the Celts and the Saxons, and a ray of hope for the heroine and her hero on the sceptered isle. We know, of course, of the bloody history yet to come. It is sad that we had no further installments from King (Buchanan's) pen, for her own exploration of the romance genre and the history of England would undoubtedly have been delightful. This book is worth searching out and cherishing. By no means should one ever loan it to a friend.