New & Current Releases
Archives: A-Z By Title
Archives: A-Z By Author
Advanced Search

All-Time High Scores
Best Of 2006
Best Of 2005
Best Of 2004
How Metascores Are Calculated
Discuss Books In Our Forums

Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed books.

The Red Queen
A Transcultural Tragicomedy
by Margaret Drabble


5.5

based on 20 reviews
read critic reviews
how did we calculate this?

based on 2 votes
read user comments
rate this book

Compare prices at pricegrabber.com

Buy it at powells.com

Buy it at amazon.com

Buy it at amazon.co.uk

Official Publisher Site

Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package-a memoir by a Korean crown princess, written more than two hundred years ago. A highly appropriate gift for her impending trip to Seoul. But from whom?...As she explores the inner sanctums and the royal courts, Barbara begins to feel a strong affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life. [Harcourt]

Harcourt, 350 pages
10/04/2004
$24.00

ISBN: 0151011060

Fiction
General Literature & Fiction

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Booklist Donna Seaman

Drabble is sleight-of-hand adept at slipping profoundly insightful musings on human nature, history, and social mores into scintillating and all-consuming novels.

Kirkus Reviews

Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.

Library Journal Mary Margaret Benson

Like Drabble's other novels, this superb story shows signs of her fascination with connections--genetic, historical, and chance-met.

Publishers Weekly

Nimbly jumping across time and around the globe, Drabble artfully stitches together the disparate strands of both women's lives with "a scarlet thread... of blood and joy."

San Francisco Chronicle June Sawyers

One of the most inventive works of fiction in recent memory.

Boston Globe Kerry Hardie

The many parallels in the lives of these two women give the book an interesting mirroring effect.

Chicago Tribune Y. Euny Hong

Drabble's tale is a quiet love song to literature, an illustration as to how reader and subject become intertwined. As Yeats wrote, how can we know the dancer from the dance?

Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore

The life-story of Lady Hong is so extraordinary, and Drabble's fascination so infectiously if nervously conveyed, that it cannot fail to absorb the reader.

Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese

Lovely, intelligent.

The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Donna Baily Nurse

Drabble writes exquisitely, but never more so than when she is describing fashion or art.

The Guardian Maureen Freely

Behind the literary games is an implausible but gorgeously trashy romance. I lapped that up, too - without anyone being the wiser. Rarely has feminist escapism been so stylishly disguised.

The Independent Charlie Lee-Potter

A delicate, scented fruit, scarred and bruised here and there, but full of life nevertheless.

The Spectator Francis King

The second half is an entertaining but not all that remarkable novella, part travelogue and part fiction. The first half, on the other hand, as luridly eventful and as stylistically rich as any Jacobean tragedy, shows Drabble in brilliant form.

Village Voice James Hunter

Her dreamy re-creation of the Crown Princess's exacting voice is extraordinary.

Sydney Morning Herald Ian Hicks

Drabble develops the Halliwell-van Jost affair with charming tenderness.

The Guardian David Jays

But both Drabble's ancient and modern Seoul lack the relish and imaginative pragmatism that have recently helped popularise Korean food and movies.

Daily Telegraph Claudia FitzHerbert

I imagine that Lady Hong comes across as quite something in the original. It is Drabble's dabbling in time travel that has dumbed her down. This is a great pity, not least because the second half of The Red Queen is so much better than the first.

The Economist

Though the crown princess's memoirs are recounted with grace and intelligence, and though the old professor's seduction of the strapping young lecturer is enjoyable, it is difficult for the reader ever to lose sight of the contrivance.

Washington Post Carolyn See

I had a lot of trouble with this book. The modern anachronisms in the first half. The travel-magazine material in the second. (Do we really need to know in such detail about ladies' public toilets in contemporary Seoul?) I disliked the British self-love that makes England the very center of the cultural universe.

The New York Times Book Review Richard Eder

What we are left with are two narratives entirely separate in style and content, and two voices that never really connect. As for tragicomedy, there's no breath of humor in the princess' stiffly told story and hardly a splinter of irony.

The average user rating for this book is 5.5 (out of 10) based on 2 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

Sarah W gave it a3:
This novel was really annoying and dull in the second half. I quite enjoyed the Crown Princess' story, but Drabble's tone in the second part was often pretentious and removed. I particularly didn't like the lack of depth given to the characters and how monosyllabic they were.

Khin A gave it an8:
Margaret Drabble's book inspired me to find out more about Lady Hong and Korean history.

Discuss this book in our forums

Return to top of page

The Red Queen A Transcultural Tragicomedy by Margaret Drabble

The Red Queen
A Transcultural Tragicomedy
by Margaret Drabble