In her own right by Amanda Schiavo

Mary is the only living child of her father Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. She’s the apple of his eye at court until he casts aside her mother for Anne Boleyn. Catherine is exiled, the catholic faith abandoned and Mary has to serve her new half-sister Elizabeth while being called a bastard herself. Nonetheless, Mary keeps fighting for her status as true heir of her father and her own catholic faith.

Elizabeth certainly outnumbers the attention Mary Tudor receives in historical fiction. Schiavo debut novel makes a fine attempt to sketch Mary’s childhood as a girl who has had a lot to endure. But also of a stubborn woman who continued to fight for her rights and her faith.

Unlike other authors, Schiavo does manage to portray Mary humanely. Mainly by creating her fictional friend Margaret and by establishing a warm relationship with Elizabeth. The two sisters are very close in this story. But once again we get a Mary who acts coldly towards all Henry’s other wives (except Jane Seymour) and most of the nobles at court… She doesn’t make things easy for herself.

The book goes in a very fast pace by just about everything that happens at the Tudor court and therefore lacks some depth for me. The story does its best to frame what happens later during her reign in the light of her unhappy childhood. And as the author herself puts it: this doesn’t excuse what ‘Bloody Mary’ did afterwards, but we may be judging this queen a bit too much for those five years of reign, rather than on everything that happened before that.

This is not the best Tudor novel I’ve read. Mary is certainly not my favourite Tudor figure. But this novel does shed a -probably- quite correct and rather warm light on England’s first queen regnant.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

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Rating: 3 out of 5.

Do you prefer Mary or Elizabeth? I think I prefer neither but Elizabeth’s reign is just more interesting.