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Teen fans of the movie
Elizabeth will be fascinated with the pomp and sinister intrigue of
Mary, Bloody Mary, an engrossing story about the teen years of Mary Tudor, half sister to Queen Elizabeth and daughter to Henry VIII. As a baby, Mary was adored by her father, who carried her around on his shoulder and displayed her for the court to admire. But as his marriage with her mother, Catherine of Aragon, waned for lack of a male heir, Henry began an affair with the beautiful Anne Boleyn. Mary was convinced that Anne was a witch. Didn't everyone know she had a sixth finger? And wasn't it Anne who persuaded Henry to declare his first marriage invalid (rendering Mary a bastard)? As the king grows ever colder, Mary is banished to a distant house, forbidden from seeing her mother, left to wear rags, and finally--at Anne's bidding--summoned back to court to be a servant to her baby half sister Elizabeth. Once there, Mary lives in constant dread that she will be poisoned or sent to the executioner's block in one of her father's rages. By the time Anne Boleyn herself is beheaded, Henry's first daughter has become the bitter and angry woman who was to be known as Bloody Queen Mary for her savage religious genocide. Carolyn Meyer, long acclaimed for her teen fiction (
Drummers of Jericho), accurately captures the glitter and grandeur as well as the brutality of this fascinating period in history. (Ages 10 to 16)
--Patty Campbell
From Publishers Weekly
This riveting slice of fictional royal history paints a sympathetic portrait of Henry VIII's oldest daughter, before she earns the title Bloody Mary. Trained not to weep in public, the young princess puts on a steely front but lives in constant fear of her father's tyranny. The novel begins in 1527 when 11-year-old Mary learns that she has been betrothed to the middle-aged king of France. The accessible first-person narrative chronicles Mary's dramatic change in status from riches to rags when her father attempts to annul his marriage to Catherine, Mary's mother, and conveys how Mary's (and the nation's) fate is affected by her father's obsession with "bewitching" Anne Boleyn, his excessive spending and his execution sprees. The novel ends in 1536, just after Henry VIII takes his third wife, Jane Seymour, and things begin to look a bit more optimistic for Mary. While the pacing is at times uneven, Meyer's (Gideon's People) account convincingly sets the stage for Mary's own sprees of persecution (mentioned in a thorough afterword) and provides an excellent introduction to pre-Renaissance customs, fashions and morals. The author's characterization of the Catholic queen demonstrates there was much more to Mary than the deeds that earned her a sanguinary nickname. Ages 11-up.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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