Author: Philippa Gregory
First Published: April 2001
Publisher: Touchstone
Series: The Tudors #2
661 pages (paperback)
Been wanting to read this book for quite a while now. I ended up watching the movie before I read this book. I liked the movie, even though it felt a bit low budget. Anyway, I was pretty excited to read this book. I discovered it’s very different from the movie but I still ended up really liking it. (As a side note, you do not need to have read other books in this “series” to understand the book).
If you know anything about this period of time, then you will have a good idea of what this book is about already. The story is from the perspective of the rather passive Mary Boleyn, who comes to the English court at the mere age of fourteen and captures the attention of the King, Henry VIII with her beauty. Mary comes from a very ambitious family, who sees this as an opportunity to further their station. They ruthlessly push Mary into the king’s arms, and the two fall in love. But when Mary becomes pregnant with Henry’s child, they can no longer have one another as they usually do and Henry drifts towards Mary’s sister, Anne, instead. Henry thinks he’s fallen in love with Anne, but really, he is still falling into the Boleyn family plans.
Anne is completely different from Mary. Anne is strong-willed and self centered. While Mary resigns to the fact that she has lost the king’s favor, Anne fights tooth and nail to keep Henry’s interest as other noble families try to push their beautiful daughters forward. However, Anne is not satisfied with mere interest. She is probably the most ambitious Boleyn family member and she is aiming for the highest rank — to become Queen of England. Thus Anne becomes a driving force behind Henry’s decision to break away from the Roman church so he can divorce his wife, Queen Katherine of Aragon, in order to marry her instead. As Anne rises higher and higher, Mary finds herself sinking lower and lower. However, Mary is the one who becomes truly happy whereas Anne finds herself isolated and sad.
I really enjoyed this novel by Philippa Gregory, though that isn’t much of a surprise; I tend to fall in love with all her works. As I say with all historical novels — if you’re really picky with historical accuracy in fiction then you probably shouldn’t read this book though, and go get a biography instead (really, I don’t understand people who read historical fiction and then complain that it was too fictional)! I personally enjoyed this book a lot, it was full of twists and turns, though compared to the other two works of her’s that I read (The White Queen and The Red Queen), I liked this one a little less. I’m not sure why; like I said, I really enjoyed it but there’s something about it that didn’t grip me in quite the same way as the other books. I think it says something that I read The White Queen and The Red Queen fairly quickly, but The Other Boleyn Girl was was spread over a week’s time. The latter half of the book, when Anne kind of took over the story, got a lot more interesting though and I plowed through the last 250 pages. Even though the story had little similarity to the movie, it made me want to watch it all over again.
The characters are a bit one dimensional, I admit. Mary is portrayed as a very kind and passionate girl who just wants love, but is used by her family members for the betterment of the Boleyn name. She doesn’t have much of a backbone and rarely stands up for herself. Anne is portrayed as, simply put, a bitch. She was bossy, arrogant and plain mean. I haven’t read enough history on these two figures to have a clear idea of what most historians portray them as, but I’m sure they were not as black and white as Gregory presented them in this book. It certainly made it difficult to feel sorry for Anne near the end of the story, if it was written with that intention. For me, the entire journey to the end had me thinking, “Well, I know Anne will get her just desserts in the end, so joke’s on her” because truly, her character was so unlikeable. As for Mary, I did wish her character happiness, though it was a bit half hearted on my part. I mean, I think I understand why they were both presented as such extreme characters; to highlight the differences between the two sisters … but perhaps it was just a tad overdone.
The Other Boleyn Girl is a historical novel about love and lust, loyalty and betrayal in the world of royalty. From the viewpoint of Mary, this book tells the story of two sisters who rise and fall in opposite directions. It is, overall, and exciting story and I imagine it would be especially so for those of you who don’t have an inkling as to what happened during this time period in England (although, if you are such a person, I do recommend educating yourself on the real historical facts afterwards — it’s really very interesting!) I wholeheartedly recommend this book to others!
My Rating: 4.5/5
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