To Die For: A Novel of Anne Boleyn

Historical Fiction by Sandra Byrd

Fair warning: I can't say anything bad about this book. I met the writer so now it's personal. It would be like saying my friend's baby wasn't cute (and I really mean that only as a metaphor, friends, your babies are all cute).

Last month my mom invited me to a book talk at our public library, where Sandra Byrd was promoting her newest book, The Secret Keeper: A Novel of Catherine Parr (Henry VIII's last wife), which is sort of a sequel to this one. Sandra showed a very informative slideshow about the Tudors and then took questions, at which time my mom proceeded to embarrass me by telling Sandra I was writing a novel, and then make up for it by buying me two books. I'm easy that way.

So this is the first in a series of three she calls the Ladies in Waiting Books, about Tudor queens (the next one due out is about Queen Elizabeth, who was Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn's daughter). They are all from the perspective of a historically real but little known lady in waiting for the queen of the day, this one being Meg Wyatt, best friend to Anne Boleyn. I got kind of tired of Anne Boleyn after the hype about The Other Boleyn Sister but this book is refreshingly different.  That's because it's not from the point of view of the royals, and because there is an element of faith interwoven into Meg's story, and because even though Anne dies, there is a happy ending for some.

What I thought about most while reading was the element of childbirth in the story and in women's lives at the time. So often in the book, a woman's fate depended on whether she had borne children. Some were shunned for being unable to have children. Some had to marry a despised man because their children would join two great estates. Some just plain died in childbirth. In Anne's case, she was beheaded because she didn't have any male children. I am thankful today that my marital and financial future don't depend on my children or their gender, but still. I think for women today there is still the sense that our lives rise and fall based on our ability to have children. As I was discussing with a friend recently, some of us are desperate to have children and can't, some are having children when they are unprepared, and some experience both in the span of just a few years. Our lives are tied to our fertility still, five hundred years after this story occurred.

Sorry if that was a little heavy. I'll try to read something with less death and destruction next time. And by the way, I got the message: there will be no more book club posts about Rick Riordan books. The more I post about him, the fewer readers I have. Sheesh.