I'd heard great things about Philippa Gregory and loved the film The Other Bolyne Girl, but was sadly disappointed. This book focuses on the time of Mary Queen of Scots and her incarseration (which was really just staying somewhere else) by Queen Elizabeth. The book took the points of view of Mary, Lord Shewsberry and his wife, Bess. Given that Mary stayed with the other two during her capture, I don't really feel that a very wide remit was given to the subject at hand. With the uprising in the North it would have been nice to see a little of Norfolks thoughts, or William Cecil's, but not, we were left to hear only the points of view of the self-absorbed Queen, the infatuated moron George and his jealous and fretful wife. I also found myself agreeing with Bess a lot of the time, on how Mary didn't seem to understand how much her inability to deal with her situation cost others, both financially and with their lives. I could have forgiven the Queen her spoilt upbringing, given her stateliness, had it not been for her continuing desire to ignore the feelings of others to meet her own ends.