The Virgin's Lover by Philippa Gregory

The Tudor series by Philippa Gregory is interesting in that the order of the books release does not match the chronological order of the matter dealt with in the books.

Regardless, I managed to read the books completely out of order - both chronological order and order of release. See below for both orders (information gleaned from Wikipedia):

The Tudor series

1. The Other Boleyn Girl (2001)
2. The Queen's Fool (2003)
3. The Virgin's Lover (2004)
4. The Constant Princess (2005)
5. The Boleyn Inheritance (2006)
6. The Other Queen (2008)

Chronologically:

• The Constant Princess (Katherine of Aragon)
• The Other Boleyn Girl (Mary and Anne Boleyn)
• The Boleyn Inheritance (Jane Boleyn, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard)
• The Queens Fool (A young Jewish Girl's story of her service in the court of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth Tudor)
• The Virgin’s Lover (Elizabeth I)
• The Other Queen (Mary I, Queen of Scots)

Before I started this blog, I had already read The Constant Princess, The Queens Fool, and The Boleyn Inheritance. All are good, but I think I recommend them in the order that I read them. The Constant Princess is dramatic, The Queens Fool is fun (told from the perspective of a girl outside of the Tudor dynasty and therefore less...what's the word...less intense? stressful?), and the Boleyn Inheritance is just plain messssssssedddd up. Who knows, maybe the Boleyn Inheritance best conveys the feeling in the Tudor Court at the time, but reading the book stressed me out.

Moving on.

The Virgin's Lover is, so far, my least favorite Philippa Gregory book. That said, it still ranks above some of my favorite books by other authors. It's quite interesting, just as richly detailed and tantalizingly dramatic as her other books, but it is just...DENSE. It takes a long time to get through, a long time even for an anti-social reader such as myself. Just keep that in mind before embarking on the project that is reading this book. It's no Crime and Punishment or War and Peace, but it does take a bit of a commitment.

If you're going to pick and choose your way through the Tudor series and you don't mind treating them as separate novels rather than an entire series, I might recommend that you skip The Virgin's Lover....but I will say that there is something more fulfilling, more enriching about reading an entire series, letting the separate novels become one huge story told through multiple points of view...so I can't, in good faith, strongly recommend that you leave this book out entirely. Just maybe read something light beforehand, and have something light lined up on the back end to follow it up.