The White Princess

Author:  Philippa Gregory

Year published: 2013
Series: The Cousins War 5

Pages: 560

Time It Took To Read: A day

This is the book I bought to baptise my new Kindle. I've wanted one for a while, but not been able to justify the expense. Then I got a first in one of my uni modules, and got one, so it is dubbed The Kindle of Reward. 

Anyway, I've read all four preceding books and this one is about Princess Elizabeth of York who married Henry VII after he acceded the throne, and she was the mother of Henry VIII. Their marriage was made for political reasons, to unite the factions of York and Lancaster after the War of the Roses, but Henry VII should have been Elizabeth's mortal enemy, moreso if she really had been having an affair with her uncle Richard III. Instead, their marriage historically seems to have been a success. 

So, the book opens on the defeated York faction waiting to be summoned to court for the proposed betrothal of Elizabeth and Henry. This eventually happens, there's gratuitous and rather unnecessary rape, magic, childbirth, women being sidelined, Margaret Beaufort being every bit The Boss that she seems to have historically been, and an abrupt ending, to make way for Margaret Pole's story, which is coming out later this year.

I love historical fiction, I really do, but sometimes Philippa Gregory's gets a bit cloyingly similar. Oh I hate him! Oh I love him! Oh I'm pregnant! Oh someone I love is dead and I'm powerless to stop it! Every single book. I keep buying them, keep reading them, but I'd love something meatier. 

Book Count: 26/50