The Other Boleyn Girl ~ 1.5 stars

The Other Boleyn Girl, by Phillipa Gregory, is a book I picked up at a friend’s house. It’s a historical fiction set in England during the time of King Henry the VIII, the English king who is known for having six wives. The Other Boleyn Girl is the story of Mary Boleyn, the sister of King Henry's second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Note: This book is what I would consider an adult level book, so while I will try and be discreet in my word-choice, I don't intend to beat around the bush in stating the facts of what this book contains.

I won't go into much detail describing the incredibly complicated plot, which is full of surprising twists and turns and a great deal of intrigue. I thought the plot was pretty good, with a very human main character with human feelings - although her moral code wasn't quite up scratch, according to me. Basically, this book is set in a time period when people behaved very immorally, and any historical book written about King Henry VIII’s court would have to at least mention a few of these immoral practices. The Other Boleyn Girl, narrated by the sister of the second wife of the king, does more than mention - the plot of the book revolves around them. The Other Boleyn Girl is also a very character driven. Most, if not all, of the characters in the story participate in highly immoral practices, and so these get a fair amount of pages dedicated to describing them.

For these reasons, I didn’t find it to be a very pleasant story. I have never been fond of stories that contain much of this sort of material because to me it's highly inappropriate and distasteful to read about. I can tolerate a certain extent of the kinds of immoral material I found in The Other Boleyn Girl, as long as the story itself is still interesting and entertaining. But because The Other Boleyn Girl was, at least the way I see it, entirely about sinful people and their sinful actions, I didn’t enjoy it very much at all.

In other aspects, such as how well it was written and how well the characters were developed, I’m sure the author did a very good job. Mary Boleyn was a very human character, and very well-developed - I just didn't approve of the things she did. In other respects, it seemed to be a very historically accurate book. I'm no expert of 16th century England, but if she was faking the details, she did a very impressive job of it. If it hadn’t been for the central role that unappealing immoral and improper behaviors played in the story, I might have given it a higher rating that 1.5 stars. This is a book I’d only advise to people who enjoy that sort of material or are very interested in that historical period, and it’s certainly not a book I’d suggest to readers younger than seventeen or eighteen.