When Kitty Tylney’s best friend, Catherine Howard, worms her way into King Henry VIII’s heart and brings Kitty to court, she’s thrust into a world filled with fabulous gowns, sparkling jewels, and elegant parties. The ribald language is kept to a minimum, however.Genres: Young Adult, Historical Fiction, Romance The Tudors were not nice people, and as such, there is quite a bit sex (all of it off-screen) and many adult situations. I’m looking forward to the next book that Longshore writes. It was captivating, engaging, and all those other words people use to gush over books. Granted, it’s fiction, not history, but I felt that Longshore did her research and did an admirable job weaving the history into the story. Many stories have been written about his earlier wives, but I knew next to nothing about Catherine Howard. (And all the sex was off-screen.) I also enjoyed that this was a side of Henry VIII that we don’t often get to see. There are sweeping vistas, beautiful dresses, corrupt men and women using girls as pawns in their elaborate games. I love Gregory’s Tudor books for their sweeping dramatizations of history, and Longshore does much of the same thing here. In many ways, this is Philippa Gregory-light. This way, as readers we get to see the corruption and the politics from the outside, making all the politics easier to stomach. In many ways, Kitty is quite the innocent bystander, near to the power, bathed in its gifts, and yet somehow manages not to get swept away in it.
However, instead of making Catherine (or Cat, to her friends) the center of the story, Longshore wisely chooses to make a friend of Catherine’s, Kitty Tylney, our eyes. Rather than tackling the obvious (Anne Boleyn), Longshore rather turns to Catherine Howard, Henry VIII’s sixth wife, for her story. I would never have thought it would have made a good teen book, but I’m happy to have been wrong. There’s something deliciously decadent about King Henry VIII and his wives, as well as the power plays and politics surrounding his marriages. There is, however, a lot about one of my favorite periods of history: the Tudors. There are no fairies, no werewolves, no vampires. First off: no matter what the cover might look like, this is not a paranormal romance.
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