First Published: 2001

Rating: Average

"I could hear a roll of muffled drums."

Ever since The Other Boleyn Girl was published back in 2001, I've had this vague idea that it would be something I'd like to read. After all, historical fiction is my favorite genre after science fiction and fantasy, and I particularly enjoy books about the Tudor line, so reading it should be a win, right? 

So it saddens me to say that this novel was a 660+ page repetitive bore (filled, of course, with boring repetition).

The overall plot is so well-known that it doesn't really even need a summary: it's the story of the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife, from the perspective of her sister Mary. Mary is inconsistent and poorly drawn; she's the only member of the Boleyn family with anything approaching scruples, but why does she have them? What is her motivation for being such an annoyingly good person?

 I could've handled Mary's boring-inconsistent-flatness if any of the other major characters had been all that likeable. Anne is inaccurately--and inconsistently--portrayed as a cold-hearted schemer who cares only about herself. Katherine of Aragon is the only female character in the novel that comes off looking nice and respectable. I liked the character of Anne and Mary's brother George well enough, and I also enjoyed the character of William Stafford, but neither of them were present enough to make up for everyone else.

The novel suffers from the same problem as other novels about well-known historical events--you already know the ending. It's a problem that many a writer has overcome through the use of compelling subplots, but The Other Boleyn Girl never manages to transcend the limitations of the genre and tell a good story. The plot is repetitive, and the language is often repetitive as well--especially the use of the phrase "everything to play for." It seemed like every three pages someone was saying that they had everything to play for, and a couple hundred pages into the book it gets incredibly annoying.

I won't discuss the controversy over the historical accuracy of the book here in detail, as it would spoil the subplots of the novel. Suffice it to say that while authors in the historical fiction genre should have some free license to play with facts, the historian whose work Gregory based The Other Boleyn Girl on has distanced herself from the novel because of the way that certain characters and situations are portrayed. In other words, if you're in love with Tudor England, give this book a wide berth.

If it were a shorter novel, with less space devoted to repetitive subplots that don't advance the action, and with less time for me to grow to dislike Mary's incessant whining, I would probably have enjoyed the novel more. And I do intend on trying some of Gregory's shorter works. As it stands, though, The Other Boleyn Girl was disappointing--too long, too boring, too unsympathetic.

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