Thank you NetGalley for the advanced copy of this book. As someone who loves History, this book was a great read. Reading about the War of the Roses From a different perspective was insightful! There is so much information about this period of history and it was refreshing to read it all in a simplified way, without complicated historical jargon. Highly recommend!

Birks does a very good job tackling the messy, convoluted Wars of the Roses and breaking them down into understandable parts, digging into both the facts of what happened, who did what, and what the possible motivations were. Birks outlines the factions and battles, making a point to underline the idea that the wars were not an inevitable outcome.

I love how he pushed back against the classist, oft-repeated idea of the Woodvilles being a powerful faction, showing just how individual and power-less the Woodvilles actually were. Birks also works to try and get away from all the bias over Richard III, righty pointing out how tainted most of what we think we know about him, and he works hard here to try and look at just the actions Richard took.

I was a little put off by how causal his tone was at times, with a lot of pop culture references and "I" statements, but that is just my own preference, and over it is an excellent guided tour of the thorny wars of the roses.