The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
God, this is all so desperately sad. It’s difficult to read a book in which you know much of the outcome and know that it is going to be awful for Quite A Lot Of Them and I suspect it’s even harder to write that something when you know Precisely What You Have To Do To Everybody. What Gregory does here is a wickedly smart thing; she allows the characters to dwell in the moment. There’s a lot of space and time here; short and snappy chapters that act like a kind of focal point within all of the noise and chatter and double-triple crossing about them. She also tells the story through three very distinct voices: the sweet foolishness of Katherine Howard, the determined survival of Anne of Cleves, and the survivor (albeit in a very different manner) Jane Rochford, sister-in-law of Anne Boleyn, grappling with the awful legacy of her actions and slowly realising what she is yet able to do.
I like Gregory a lot and this is no exception. Yes, there were a few moments when we kind of got stuck on a theme and became slightly repetitive but I suspect that you would behave precisely like this in the circumstances because you are too busy freaking out to worry about being repetitive or not. I was also genuinely appreciative of how Gregory handled Katherine Howard. I had such a lot of sympathy for her even during her most self-centered moments because, as Gregory shows, she was a child in a world that was far beyond her. The final few chapters between Katherine and Jane are genuinely moving, utterly tragic things. It’s awful, it’s raw, and Gregory is rather desperately perfect here.
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Daisy May Johnson 