The Other Boleyn Girl
The Plantagenet and Tudor Novels • Book 9
by Philippa Gregory
Why You'll Love This
Mary Boleyn watched her sister seduce a king and topple a church — and she was the one who had to survive it.
- Great if you want: Tudor court intrigue seen through a witness, not the legend
- The experience: propulsive and soap-operatic — hard to put down despite the length
- The writing: Gregory writes power and desire as inseparable — the politics are always personal
- Skip if: historical liberties bother you — Gregory invents freely
About This Book
At the Tudor court, power is currency and women are the coin. When fourteen-year-old Mary Boleyn is offered to Henry VIII by her own ambitious family, she enters a world where love and danger are inseparable — and where the sister she adores is also her most dangerous rival. Philippa Gregory builds her story not around Anne Boleyn, whose fate everyone already knows, but around Mary, the girl history nearly forgot. It's a brilliant pivot, because from Mary's vantage point, the court's glittering machinery is both seductive and merciless, and the reader feels every shift in fortune with her.
Gregory writes historical fiction with the pacing of a thriller and the intimacy of a diary, pulling readers so deeply into Mary's perspective that the claustrophobia of court life becomes almost physical. The novel's real strength is psychological — the complicated loyalty between two sisters who are simultaneously each other's greatest comfort and sharpest threat. Gregory never reduces her characters to villains or victims, which gives the book a moral tension that lingers well after the final page.
