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megan_deppe234 's review for:
The King's Curse
by Philippa Gregory
While not one of the Gregory books I was initially excited about reading, this is one of the more interesting ones I've picked up in my work-through of her Tudor series. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, this novel is the closest I've seen Gregory come to describing Jane Seymour. I once went to a book signing and asked her if she would ever write about the third queen (at the time she'd covered maybe four of the six), and she said she doubted it, and I always wondered what it would be like if she did. In "The Other Boleyn Girl", though Jane is an important character, we hardly ever meet or hear from her - she is important from afar - and now we do get a sense at least of how Gregory views her. I do understand the decision not to write about her - her reign was fairly short, she wouldn't have been involved in most of the interesting events happening around her (the Pilgrimage of Grace, which was much more centralized here with Margaret Pole), and her legacy has been mostly defined by her death and her son, which is hardly enough to fill an entire novel. It was just nice to get an insight into the third Tudor queen in the line. The second reason this was a page-turner for me is, sadly, knowing how the story ends. Not only did Margaret Pole have a long life connected to major players in the time (seeing her relationship with Mary Tudor was particularly interesting to read, since Mary isn't really a central character until after her father's death), but her death is so violent and horrifying (even by Henry VIII standards) that you want to know how it is going to be handled. It was a graceful depiction that doesn't shy away from what happened, but also isn't as bleak as other descriptions of the event have been.