Barro y cenizas es una novela que nos hace revivir la fecunda y heroica historia del siglo XII francés. La acción tiene por marco un castillo en los confines de la Champaña y la Borgoña; las pequeñas ciudades turbulentas; las aldeas y los campos; y, también, Tierra Santa y sus riberas inhospitalarias, Jerusalén y el Santo Sepulcro. La intriga se desarrolla a lo largo de la vida conyugal de la hermosa Aalais y de Ansiau, barón de Linnières: su amor, su separación, los numerosos hijos que les proporcionan alegría y preocupaciones a la vez, su senectud y su muerte. Pero sobre todo, esta novela es la iniciación, para el lector, a un modo de vida y a una moral que nos parecen extraños al principio, pero que conforme vamos leyendo se nos revelan justos y profundamente naturales, y en los que nos reconocemos, en fin, porque en Barro y cenizas se exaltan y apaciguan las pasiones humanas que comparten todas las épocas.

Although this book had a slow beginning, once I got into it, I couldn't put it down. Everything seemed very real and the people and situations will stay with me for a long time. ( )

The World is Not Enough is set in France in the late 12th century. Opening with the marriage of Alis and Ansiau, the reader is immediately thrust into the lives of these characters and the time they lived in, right up through old age. The focus of the novel is on the Crusades, which Ansiau participates in, leaving Alis at home to manage the household and become a person in her own right.

The strength of the novel lies in the amount of detail with which the author provides the reader, but I thought that at times the detail bogged down the pace and progress of the story, making the book at least 100 pages longer than it really needed to be. We also get told a lot of things rather than have them shown to us, which made the novel much less interesting to read. The prose is also stilted, which may have more to do with the translation of the book (originally published in French) rather than the author’s actual style. In the end I found that I didn’t really like many of the characters or care about what happened to them, so I stopped reading at around 200 pages. I don't know how the author did it, but she even managed to make the Crusades seem uninteresting--and medieval history was my specialty in college. ( )

If "Pride and Prejudice" is more than a historical novel then so is Zoe Oldenbourgs "The World is not Enough". Its about a family and society in their historical setting, in this case medieval France at the time of the crusades, and it very effectively captures the world of Ansiau de Linnières and his relatives from his birth to his old age.

This remarkable book is far ahead of anything I've read by Cecelia Holland or Rosemary Sutcliffe and I can't recommended it highly enough, particularly for the authors' portrayal of the women of Linnières. ( )

Feels authentically horrible and beautiful. The Middle Ages were probably like this.