Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

The Queen's Lady

by Barbara Kyle

Reviewed by Coral


This is another book where the summary on the back of the book and the book’s actual summary are two very different things.

Whereas the summary talks about Honor Larke, lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine, who becomes a spy for her mistress after she witnesses the queen’s humiliations as King Henry tries to legally set her aside for Anne Boleyn, that only really takes up the very beginning of the book.

The book is mainly about Honor coming to terms with her own religious beliefs, torn between how she was raised by Thomas Moore (she was named his ward after being orphaned at a young age) and the injustices she sees being committed. With the protestant spirit awakening in her heart, she risks everything to do what she feels is right and save as many people as she can from being killed in the name of their religion.

Along the way she meets a man, Richard Thornleigh, who awakens her heart, but whom she can never have, as he is already married.

One of my biggest pet peeves are books where I don’t get the story that I think I will be getting based on the summary I’ve read. I’m not sure I would have picked up this book if I knew that it would be mainly set around covert rescue missions and had very little to do with Catherine of Aragon.

Like I’ve mentioned before, my first real exposure to the Tudor world was with the show itself. On the show, I certainly felt more sympathy for Catherine of Aragon and felt she got short-changed in the book. For someone who was supposedly a main character, or motivation for Honor’s actions, she isn’t in a whole lot of the book. Cardinal Wolsey’s downfall was dealt with a little too quickly. I think the TV show did a better job of showing Thomas Moore as someone conflicted by his beliefs and sacrifices himself to save his soul. I also had a lot of sympathy for Bishop/Cardinal Fisher from the show and felt he was underused here.

As the main characters were Honor and, to a lesser extent, Richard, I felt that a lot of the historical characters got lost in the mix. We got a couple of chapters dealing with Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, King Henry and Thomas Cromwell, but they never really felt fleshed out. Especially in the case of Thomas Cromwell, I felt like I would have liked more chapters to really understand his motivations. Though, considering how long it took before Honor’s love interest Richard got a chapter to explain his character, I guess that was hoping for too much.

I think the book did a good job with showing how events caused Honor to question her religious beliefs, but I felt that it didn’t go a good enough job showing how she came to turn her back on Catherine. Someone asked her and she just stated her reasons at one point, but I think there should have some scenes where she struggled to come to terms with the fact that her new beliefs weren’t shared by Catherine or were setting her down a different path from the queen she had been loyally serving up to that point.

I know it’s a romance story, so there will be a happy ending, but I thought some of the situations that Honor and Richard lived through were a little far-fetched.

Grade: D