The Secret Bride, Diane Haeger
In short: One of the weaker entrants into that wonderful subgenre of historical fiction, “Seedy novels about the Tudorsâ€, 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)