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Shelley Puhak is a poet and writer whose work has been published in such notable periodicals and journals as the Atlantic and Teen Vogue. Her essays have been published in The Best American Travel Writing and selected as Notables in four editions of The Best American Essays. She has written three books of poetry including the intriguingly named Guinevere in Baltimore. She lives in Maryland. 

The Dark Queens is Puhak’s nonfiction debut and is “a work of narrative nonfiction based on primary sources.” She has two pages of notes on her sources and the methods she used to interpret them, as well as the potential biases of the authors of those sources. Puhak created an intriguing narrative of the lives of Brunhild and Fredegund, two Frankish queens of the Merovingian era. However, as well written and intriguing the narrative may be, and how well researched the book – there are so many pages of citations! – this book did not meet expectations for this reader. And I had so many delightful expectations beginning with the badass looking queens on the cover.

Let me tell you a little story about a Medieval History class I took at Bishop’s University in Quebec where my professor had our first assignment be a work of fiction – or more accurately a work of historical fiction – where we were to cite all of our sources as regards the life, times, and actions of our fictional characters. THAT is the style of writing I was expecting from Puhak; queenly daily life with dialogue and descriptions of the building and maybe some emotional angst. What we are given is what I would consider a solid undergraduate level work of feminist history of the two queens and the long list of men who surrounded them. I DNF’d at Chapter 16, about halfway through the story. I don’t know if it was a lack of met expectations for me, the right book at the right time, or just not the book that I really wanted to be reading. (Nikki has challenged me to keep reading it a few chapters at a time instead of trying to binge read like I normally do, and then perhaps I might enjoy it more and actually get through it while I still have it borrowed from the library. I’ll continue to do that, but no promises about actually finishing the book.) I gave Puhak a solid week of attempts at reading and the nonfiction just couldn’t keep me engaged enough to be able to read more than a few chapters at a time, and then we were out of time for this blog post.

I’m going to have to give The Dark Queens two stars, for all the struggles I named above, especially my lack of met expectations. I’ll be generous and bump the two stars up to three for a topic about two Frankish queens who were grossly mischaracterized by most of history (I did read some of the Epilogue, and I found that more interesting than the main topic because it was on the current state of the artifacts of the Merovingian era as well as how Brunhild and Fredegund have been portrayed throughout history. Nineteenth century opera anyone?!

What nonfiction title did you really want to like for all the right reasons and when it came right down to it the topic was just not right for you at that time?

~Ashley

Readers, take note, sometimes it’s the right book, but the wrong time.  Ashley loves history, we both love all things francophone and feminist takes, so a book about two sixth century queens making things happen should be right down our alley.  That’s why it made it to my holds and our book review list.  We both expected more dialogue and less treatise in The Dark Queens and yet, I’ll give author Shelley Puhak a bit more credit than she receives above and say it reads like a really well researched graduate paper, perhaps even post-graduate, but y’all, that is not what I wanted to read.  What I want is an author like Allison Pataki to take this work and turn it into something magical, binge-worthy, and – dare I say – fictional.  

Ashley hits the nail on the head when she says expectation fail is the problem here.  We were expecting narrative nonfiction, which was delivered, but I was expecting something less academic and more conversational.  The Dark Queens isn’t inaccessible, but I do think it is not bingeable, and you darling readers know we love a good binge (and might just be enjoying one later tonight 😉 after a week of pushing through nonfiction.  

For those still reading, The Dark Queens is the story of two queens who rule between Clovis and Charlemagne.  Those of us with a greater than average education in medieval French history will recall Clovis centralized power, then decentralized it by chopping his kingdom up in equal parts for his four sons.  Brunhild was a Visigoth princess from Spain who married one of Clovis’s grandsons and Fredegund was an enslaved woman before she became the third wife to another of Clovis’s grandsons, making them neighbors, sisters-in-law, and competitors.  The church is involved, because of course they were with all of their drama.  There are Angle and Saxon pagans in Britannia in “need” of conversion, and the dukes are either trying to grab at power, hang on to what they have, or take it away from *gasp* a woman!  Meanwhile we also have Justinian and Sophia poking their noses in from the Byzantine Empire and former queens trying to live their best lives in the convents where they’ve been put so they’re out of their ex-husband’s way.  

The Dark Queens has all the makings for a really fun hang with a direct, open, and somewhat snarky writing style, but it does paint a broad picture rather than one that lets us really hang out with the characters.  For that, and the expectation fail, I’m giving it three stars.  I am not likely to read this again, and I will approach Puhak’s future works with a bit more investigation before adding them to my TBR.  This was by no means bad, but it was not the right book for me right now.  Am I interested in more from this timeline and these specific Dark Queens?  Absolutely, but it’s going to have to be the right book.

I do want to leave you with some more praise for The Dark Queens, because I do believe it warrants it.  Some of my favorite fun facts are that I was last week years’ old when I learned that the “traditional” viking helmet I picture is actually the invention of a nineteenth century costume designer.  The Wagner opera the helmet was designed for is also the source of the phrase “it ain’t over until the fat lady sings,” and said fat lady is based on our Brunhild.  The Valkyrie’s fictional story from Der Ring des Nibelungen is roughly based on a combination of Brunhild and Fredegund, grafted onto Norse legends.  

Puhak sums up the lives of Brunhild and Fredegund nicely in one line – “it was a fine line between saint and witch.” These women lived amazing lives, fought sixth century illnesses, child mortality, and, of course, the patriarchy, and they were struck from the records, their names hidden away, which Puhak points out would have been done purposefully.  The men who led after them took away the chance for generations of women to have an example to follow, and I’m so grateful to Puhak for digging through the records that do remain and providing it to women who want to lead today, from those who are still enslaved to those who were born into families of wealth and privilege.  As Puhak says:

I don’t know what it would have meant for me, and for other little girls, to have found Queen Fredegund’s and Queen Brunhild’s stories collected in the books I read. To discover that even in the darkest and most tumultuous of times, women can, and did, lead.

What is a book that changed the way you think of the world or of how you fit into it?

~Nikki

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