The Sixth Wife

Interestingly written take on a Tudor woman who never shows up in fiction since she had nothing to do with Anne Boleyn. The author deliberately wrote a style that I wouldn't really call “modern” but it wasn't all “prithee, wouldst thou” - Ms. Dunn explains that we only have letters and documents, so we don't know people actually spoke that way (after all, in modern times we typically don't speak the way we write formal documents). This made the book refreshing and easy to follow.

The story itself interesting - Catherine Parr (the titular sixth wife) is a secondary character despite being the titular character, the focus is on her historical best friend, also named Catherine (called Cathy in the book). She grapples with disapproving of Catherine's choice in a fourth husband and her own complicated feelings in regards to him, before the historic downfall of many of the top players of the court from the end of Henry VIII's reign.

This is of course historical FICTION so there are some plot lines for which there is no historic concrete evidence, including one that ends up being ambiguous - since we don't see anything from Elizabeth's perspective, well...

The book was very interesting and a good read, although I did find the very beginning a little slow. Once I got into it I was reading 3 or 4 chapters a night. Great book!