Spotlight: "The Other Boleyn Girl" and "Live A Little"

I should never have put off reading this book. That it's so thick has always discouraged me from getting started, but once I jumped over that hurdle, I found myself completely engrossed in it. It is so much better, so much richer than the movie (though Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johanssen were both really hot).

This novel was so good, it made me research on Henry VIII and his wives, and just how much of the novel was factual. As it turns out, everything is based on facts-- the only points that are fiction are the thoughts, intentions, motivations of the characters. But Anne Boleyn really did have a sister named Mary who was a mistress of the King and bore him two childern. The affair with Anne really did prompt Henry to seek an annulment from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon. And so on, and so forth.

The best thing is, I researched on the rest of Philippa Gregory's novels, and it turns out that a couple more revolve around the same time period: The Constant Princess is about Katherine of Aragon and how she ended up marrying Henry VIII (so it's actually the prequel to The Other Boleyn Girl in a chronological sense); The Boleyn Inheritance takes place immediately after The Other Boleyn Girl and talks about the rest of Henry VIII's wives; The Queen's Fool seems to be the transition novel before the reign of Queen Elizabeth; and The Virgin's Lover is during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. So even if these novels all stand alone and have separate plots, reading it in order would probably feel like reading an entire saga on English history. Now if only they weren't so long.

I was excited to start reading this novel, and in the beginning, I was amused by her humor. Then it started getting tiresome. Then I couldn't wait for it to end.

It's actually a little difficult to explain what I didn't like about it. While I liked the premise, I felt that everything was becoming too unbelievable. Becoming a breast cancer advocate overnight, thanks to guesting on her sister's talk show (apparently, the sister is like Tyra). The sudden reawakening of her artistic side because she is commissioned to make a series of sculptures using casts of actual breast cancer survivors. By this time, it kinda became more about a mid-life crisis than about her not really having cancer and not knowing how to come clean about it. Add to that too many pop culture references --the daughter wanting to be emancipated because she thinks she's Lindsay Lohan, the image of a pregnant Britney Spears as a deterent for unwanted pregnancy, a breast cancer survivor named "Imelda, like the dictator... and I could imagine her with a closet filled with Manolos"-- and the one phrase that popped into my head was, "This novel is trying too hard."

Too bad, the premise was intriguing, but the execution was nothing great. What a waste of promise.

The good thing is, I'm officially 11 out of 18 on my reading list now! Woohoo!