Helpful Score: 2
Although this book was quite enjoyable, it got very repetitive at times. Really, if I had to read "I am ready to make my destiny, to take my place in history," etc. or something with similar wording, one more time, I would have throw the book across the room. However, I did enjoy the subject matter. Katherine of Aragon is often regulated to the margins of history...she's Henry VIII's first wife, cast aside for Anne Boleyn. It was nice to see her as a more 3-dimensional person. I liked how Philippa Gregory built on what Katherine's relationship with her first husband, Arthur, may have been like (since do we really know what happens behind closed doors), and that Katherine may have had her own motives for wanting to marry Henry. Gregory also did a nice job showing how Katherine's childhood with militant monarch parents may have shaped her outlook on life (and I got a totally different perspective of Ferdinand and Isabella as rulers...very different than the king and queen who sent Christopher Columbus on his voyage that you learned about in school). It was also refreshing to see the Moors of Spain in a positive light as a well-educated civilization and to see the English and Spanish as being the ones that were less civilized, since usually this is portrayed the other way around.
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