Review: The Secret Bride, by Diane Haeger

The Secret Bride, Diane Haeger

In short: One of the weaker entrants into that wonderful subgenre of historical fiction, “Seedy novels about the Tudors”, The Secret Bride chronicles the fate of Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s younger sister and sometime Queen of France. Her story is fun and thrilling, as she’s married off to a much-older man, and then elopes with her beloved Charles Brandon, who’s a friend of her brother’s and decidedly not blue-blooded enough for a princess. But the writing is bad, and the historical inaccuracies glaring. We’ll have to wait a little longer for a really good book about Princess Mary.

Read it if you like: Philippa Gregory, The Tudors (which, in case you’re curious, is considerably less historically accurate than even Haeger’s novel)

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