2023 PopSugar Challenge: a book about a divorse

[baronessekat]

Anna of Kleve: The Princess in the Portrait by Alison Weir

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


3.5 of 5 stars

Anna is the princess from a small German Duchy that is struggling to remain free from the Holy Roman Empire. Her family, desperate to secure an alliance breaks her engagement with a French prince to make her available for the newly widowed King Henry VIII of England.

The King, desperate to have more legitimate children, commissions a portrait of the young woman from Germany. The artists paints her face-on to not emphasize her elongated nose and chin. The King proposes based on the picture and Anna goes to England to become Queen.

Even though they are married, Henry claims she does not look like her portrait and that he was deceived. He does not consummate the marriage on the grounds of deception and his belief that her original engagement was never legally broken.

After months, she becomes the second of his wives to be set aside, though he continues to remain her friend and even adopts her as his sister.

Anna then struggles to maintain a household, her honor and integrity and pride through scandal and heartbreak.

++++++

I have read other books by this author, but this is the first in this series. While I enjoy her writing over Phillipa Gregory, I was left underwhelmed by this particular story.



View all my reviews