This is a fairy tale story -- a real fairy tale: A young woman fights through great difficulties to win the man of her dreams -- and then, instead of living happily ever after, dies young.

The Paston Family are better known to us than perhaps any other family of the medieval gentry, because of the great cache of family letters discovered and published in the eighteenth century. Most of the members of the family of John Paston I (1421-1466) and Margaret Mautby Paston (1422?-1484) lived the lives that you would expect of people of their period who had made a lot of enemies: They struggled to regulate their lands, they tried to get support of the nobles, they mostly kept their heads low in the Wars of the Roses, but occasionally got in trouble anyway.

Margery Paston, the daughter of John and Margaret, was different. When probably in her mid- to late teens, she fell in love with Richard Calle, who in today's terms would be one of the senior company officers of John Paston & Co., Incorporated. She was gentry, even if she was a daughter with no inheritance; he was a commoner close to twice her age. Richard Calle was a vital and steadfast retainer, but there was no way the proud, stuck-up Pastons would let their daughter marry a man who worked for money -- not even money that they themselves paid.

For two years, they fought to prevent the marriage, but eventually the Bishop of Norwich concluded that Margery Paston and Richard Calle had made binding vows, and said that they should marry. It cost Calle his job, at least temporarily, but he (and she) had the love of his life.

That's the fairy tale. The non-fairy tale? She died within a dozen years or so, apparently never forgiven by her mother, leaving three sons, and Richard Calle went on to raise a second family. The Pastons as a whole struggled, lost much of their lands, and the family line eventually died out.

There are several editions of the Paston Letters, and several other books about the family, but this is the only one, as far as I know, told from the standpoint of Margery.

Unfortunately, that makes it a little sketchy. We have letters from Margery's family, including letters about her, but none from Margery herself. We have some to and from Calle, but they are mostly about business -- though there is one love letter to Margery that he told her to destroy but that was apparently intercepted. So we can't really know how the two felt, except that they stayed true despite the campaign to prevent their marriage, so presumably their love was strong.

I felt a little bothered by how much author Curran filled into the tale. And the documentation struck me as a little skimpy -- pages of text supplied with just one or two footnotes per page. I don't feel as if I can trust the result absolutely. But, in outline, it is surely true, and a good example of what a real fairy tale would be like.

There is one other quirk about the book: It is profusely, often beautifully, illustrated with photographs of the country where the Pastons lived, and the buildings they might have known. These take up a lot of space, so the book has less text than you'd think at first glance, and there are a few pages where the text is overlaid on the photographs and is hard to read.

All photos are identified as to where they were taken -- e.g. one on page 64 is "Church of St Mary, Shelton, Suffolk." But that photo, of a woman with a halo, so presumably a saint, has a block of text in it. Since there is text, it almost certainly identifies who is being pictured. But I can't read the text at that scale, and the identifying note does not say who it is. Not one of the photos of stained glass portraiture says who is being portrayed. The photos are beautiful, but without identification, they really don't add much to the story.

I liked this book. It's a good story, decently told. I would dearly like to know more about both Margaret and about Richard Calle (who, among other things, owned a book that contained one of the two oldest tales of Robin Hood). But I wish there could be a second edition, with a little more documentation all around. If you just want the story, and don't care about looking up the sources, that may not matter. ( )