Lexi

I love Anne of Cleves, but I just couldn't get into this book. The parts that featured Henry VIII weren't very interesting, and of course it's a book about his wives so he's in it quite a few times. I liked the invention of a hopeless love between court painter Hans Holbein and Anne. I just gave up reading. It's not boring, exactly, it's just... not intriguing, I guess? I'm not sure. I read books before I go to bed and I found I was putting off going to bed so I wouldn't have to read the book. It's not BAD. I'm sure for readers in 1952 who didn't have a wealth of other, more exciting Tudor fiction it was pretty good.
Also my copy (published in 1952!) was full of typos and there's some occasionally confusing sentence structure, so I'd have to go back and reread something three times to figure out who was talking. Like it would say “...he said” but the dialogue sounded like it should've been said by Anne.

I mean I love reading but it took me a month to get through 40 pages. My recommendation is to check it out of a library if possible, don't buy unless you can get it for super cheap.

Also this isn't really a review, but the cover for the 1952 version is hilarious - we all know approximately what Anne looked like because of a few paintings of her, but the 1952 cover features a 1950s-style pinup of an almost blue-skinned woman with shoulder-length black hair and curved bangs. Looks absolutely nothing like Anne of Cleves, it's actually pretty funny.

An okay follow-up to the first book. It's extremely repetitive and so easy to figure out what's happening almost immediately. Protagonist Jane spends like 85% of the book crying and literally vomiting, after several people encourage her to actually confront her husband she... doesn't. Until the very end. But nobody including her therapist seems to care that she's literally making no effort?

The not-really subplots with Calla go nowhere - she for some reason is in love with a frog and has a massive melt down when the frog escapes to mate with a frog, and a character suggests her overreaction is actually symptomatic of some bigger issue Calla is having. This is never addressed again. So why was Calla freaking out so much over a frog??? We never find out. I thought it was going to lead to a heart-to-heart between Jane and Calla where Calla reveals she feels abandoned by her father (who's busy with his gallery opening), but nope. Never comes up again.

There's a recurring piece of advice that's basically “just because Person A cheated on Person B doesn't mean Person A doesn't still love Person B, so Person B should forgive Person A” which is really weird that it came up so many times, with no nuance? There's no like “Oh yeah he forgave me for cheating on him, but I had to work for years to re-earn his trust.” It's just “Yeah I was forgiven for cheating and it's fine now, so you should forgive YOUR husband for cheating on you.” It was just weird and made me uncomfortable with how many characters were apparently totally fine with cheating/being cheated on?

Jane resolves to Finally Do Something what feels like 75 times, and it gets so annoying. Also annoying is how much of this book is just a recap of fairy tales. Gothel spends like two pages describing the plot of Rapunzel for some reason.

And...
Like I said, it's incredibly obvious pretty much immediately that Jane is already pregnant, and of course that Gallant is not actually cheating on her. So the extremely sustained misunderstanding throughout the first like 210 pages isn't fun to read. The explanation in-universe for why Jane didn't realize she was pregnant is fine, although it doesn't really make sense to me that as soon as she knows she's pregnant she now constantly feels the baby kicking when she didn't before. Her friends give her terrible advice. And it was weird, Winnie is so casual for so long about not caring at all that Jane thinks her marriage is in danger, then abruptly decides that she and Jane should stop hanging out for a while, and then as abruptly she and Jane are friends again and Winnie cares SO MUCH about Jane's worries about being cheated on. It seriously feels like the author wrote half of this book at once and came back to it after like two years without rereading anything.

I really enjoyed the first book, but the sequel is just... not it. I didn't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever reread it. I'd love to see like a “director's cut” of the sequel, though. The storyline is okay and the characters are good, it's like the book just needs something to be as great as the first one.

This was such a weirdly uneven book. Parts of it would be written really well, intriguing, great read. Other parts, not so much. Right off the bat I noticed this odd quirk where a bunch of characters would start a sentence with “Well,”. It would happen so many times on one page! Other phrases would get repeated within like 3 paragraphs of each other. Very noticeable. Then there'd be a lot of nothing really happening.

I completely understand as a historical fiction account of a historical person you obviously have to stick to the script, so to speak, so of course things like Sisi NOT standing up to her aunt/mother-in-law at 16 makes sense even though it's frustrating. The author explains in the end that certain people were excluded from the narrative because they weren't really relevant to Sisi, but it's still extremely odd to me that not once did Franz Joseph's father ever get mentioned even though he was alive during the timeframe of this book. Did Sisi seriously have no thoughts at all about her father-in-law, the man married to her biggest enemy (Sophie)? Or her siblings - the beginning of the book involves Sisi figuring out how to stand up against her younger brother and then all the things she does in order to make her sister Helene look good, and then after Sisi gets married her siblings get mentioned like twice. We don't even get to see her at her childhood home as an adult, interacting with her family, we just get told that she went there and it was fine until her mother told her to leave. There's also absolutely no mention of Sisi's older brother, and sure I don't expect him to be part of the narrative because he didn't seem to have much to do with Sisi's life as empress, but it would seem like SOMEONE mentioning the disgraced oldest brother who abdicated his position as heir at some point would've made sense, especially with the overall idea of duty and commitment?

I also didn't really find the second falling in love part very convincing. Sisi hates Andrassy and then basically just doesn't hate him anymore one time? Because she likes Hungary?? There's not really anything shown that made me convinced of their love, other than that Sisi appreciated SOMEONE finally talking to her about politics.

Overall it just felt like the book was uneven in terms of quality. One chapter would be great, and then one would be amateurish and repetitive. After 490 pages I ultimately don't feel like I really KNOW any of the people in the book. I don't have a good feel for why Franz Joseph is so tolerant of Sophie - yes she's his mother and yes she helped get him where he is, but but is he so fine with her basically acting as the empress and bullying his wife that he loves so much? Why was Helene so meek and wanting to be a nun? Why was Sisi so... everything? I do want to read the sequel, hopefully the writing quality will be improved.

5/5 would read again

[Description from inside the dust jacket of the book, since there is no description on goodreads]

The Normans were the conquerors, the oppressors, the new lords of England. Tales of their tyranny, their greed for land, had traveled before them, even into the remote corners of the Welsh Marches, and men feared and hated them.

Nothing could have persuaded Elfreda, daughter of a Saxon thane, into marriage with one of the invaders, except the hope that the union would save her father's people from further bloodshed.

But the Saxons would not accept their Norman overlords and soon rebellion was flaring along the length of the March.