The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
My Rating: 4/5 stars
The story of The Other Boleyn Girl is about the two Boleyn sisters – Mary, from whose point-of-view we see the story, and Anne, whose rise and fall is at the centre of the story.
Despite the many historical inaccuracies I still found Gregory's book to be an enjoyable read. Though admittedly a lot of that has to do with bias. This book has a strong Catholic bias that is against Anne, Henry VIII and Protestantism. It doesn't even try to be objective and showcase the pros and cons of both religions but blatantly goes against Henry VIII as a selfish and spoiled child and the Church of England as a whim of a tyrant with no mention of some of the points of Protestantism against the Catholic Church of the 16th century. So I could see why someone could really dislike this book and why I found it so delicious, a guilty pleasure of sorts. It takes painful history and "makes it sensible" by telling a story where it's okay that some people were horribly treated because they were bad and in the end everyone got what they deserved.
So about Gregory's Mary. I can't say that I liked her very much. She was the meek and good Boleyn girl that was the mirror image of Anne who was ill tempered, arrogant, selfish and in general the bad girl and it was all of those things that made her interesting. You wanted to read about her, you wanted see what would happen to her whereas Mary on the other seemed kind of dull. It was only during the later part when her romance with her second husband William Stafford unfolds that I actually developed sympathy for her. Another problem is that she is too white-washed. There is no mention of her life at the French court (that she had to leave in shame) before her marriage but that I guess would depart from the pure, innocent character that the author seemed to have for her. It makes an interesting contrast between her and Anne but it's just horribly historically inaccurate. And her last problem is that she is just too modern at times. This is something that you see a lot in modern historical fiction when the writer wants an easy way to endear the character to the reader - have them be the modern one. So of course Mary is the one to say that there's no reason a girl could not be a Queen. Of course Mary is the one to lament about the way women are treated in the 16th century and so on. It’s just painfully obvious and makes her stand out and simply not fit into her setting of Tudor England.
Another thing that I didn't like about The Other Boleyn Girl was its anticlimactic ending. After the book spends all its time focusing on Anne and her story for her last moments the focus is completely on Mary. We don't see Anne at her darkest moment and that's a real shame because after seeing her make her fortune on so many peoples misery I was really looking forward to her fall, to see her treated like she treated so many others. But we never see that, it's just a swift end and that's it.
So that was the bad but beside all that there was actually a lot that I liked. The setting was one thing. It portrayed the court of Henry VIII as both this wonderful, but also dangerous place where one is always on a stage and playing one part or another. The Howard/Boleyn family dynamic was interesting, especially between the three Boleyn siblings Mary, Anne and George and their dilemma of on one hand obeying their "superiors" and on the other following their own dreams and desires. And the court intrigues I found to be really delicious.
So that's The Other Boleyn Girl, a book that very clearly takes a side and sticks to it so it might work for you and it might not.
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