A review by nindie
The Six Wives of Henry VIII by Alison Weir

challenging informative slow-paced

2.0

If you're obsessed with anything to do with Henry VIII's wives and their lives, then this is the perfect book to read. I'm not obsessed with particular parts of history since I like a range of stuff mixed in one broad category. I like reading and looking into anything to do with the British monarchy, but for me, this was too much information at once. It was like a massive info dump, and it overwhelmed me so much that I got into a bit of a reading slump. What made me pick up this book was that I was interested in learning more about the wives, but then I didn't know my reading preferences that well when I bought the book. This book made me realise that long history books are not my thing.

What I Liked About The Book

There were a couple of things I liked about the book, such as how we see each personality of the wives and how they affected many things during the Tudor period. The book showed how each wife impacted history in their ways. Plus, this book gave me more insight into what happened and what was going through their heads at the time. Because of this, it made me think of them more as genuine people than personas in history that I thought behaved far from an average person.

What I Disliked About The Book

A major thing was the length for me. It would have been better if the book was split up into separate ones instead so it could be easier to read. By the section about Anne Boleyn, I felt pretty worn out reading the book since it was just too much information at once. Another thing relating to the Anne Boleyn section is that it went for a very long time to the point where the last four wives had half the amount of pages written about them individually in comparison to Anne Boleyn. The third thing that I disliked was that sometimes the book would speak about stuff that wasn't about the topic of the book that much, which wasn't important for me to know as much. Also, with the writing sometimes there would be repetitiveness in terms of sometimes the same things would be pointed out multiple times. It got a bit annoying seeing how many times stuff got pointed out when I processed that information the first time. And finally, something that isn't that much of a big deal but worthy of pointing out is the images. The placement and organisation of the images were a bit weird to me since some of the images were mentioning stuff that was far later mentioned in the book. It would have been better if all the images were split separately in places where they were mentioned or where the images related to the text a bit more.

In Conclusion

Although this would be handy for me if I ever needed to use this for research in my history lessons or personal research, it just wasn't for me. And I mostly love Anne of Cleves and Katherine Parr out of the six wives! Maybe next time, I'll try not to go for non-fictional books that are 400+ pages because this tired me out by the end, and I just wanted to finish it quickly without giving up on it because that would mean I would waste my money.
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