Correct me if I'm wrong, but biographies normally focus mostly on their subject, no? The vast majority of the pages in the book are given to whoever the author has chosen to write about. The biographee is supposed to emerge as a real person and not only a story by the end, and we are supposed to come away knowing a lot about him/herher.

If those are the standards for biographies, I'd say this book kind of fails. I've read Philippa Gregory's "The Other Boleyn Girl" (but didn't enjoy it much), and I didn't learn a whole lot from Alison Weir's book that I didn't know already. Mary is so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that she fades into the background of her own biography. Two hundred pages into the book I was still relatively uninterested in Mary, but I was expecting her to be redeemed once she'd married William Stafford, a marriage which was apparently for love, an extreme rarity in those days. But no. Of even this I was cheated. Instead, this important second marriage is passed over in terms something like this: "Mary appeared at court visibly pregnant. Anne was furious and demanded an explanation; Mary told her she had married William Stafford in a secret ceremony. She left the court." Then we read perhaps ten pages about where Mary and William probably lived (Calais) immediately after their marriage.

Fascinating stuff. Mary is still totally boring. I am not a great biography reader, but I've read Antonia Fraser's "Marie Antoinette", in which MA seems to have a real personality. I have also read Amanda Foreman's lamentable "The Duchess"; even in this unfortunate work Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire has more than a few characteristics. She seems like a real person. But Weir doesn't seem to believe in this: Mary is just as boring at the end of the book as she was at the beginning. I'm no longer interested in anything to do with her; I'd rather read about her sister. Mary is the other Boleyn girl: she's too dull to be anything but.

Besides this awful lack of interest in the subject of the book, the worst thing about it was that Weir spent pages and pages and pages on the most trivial of things, and skipped over vital events like Mary's second marriage. She writes no less than six (6, as in six) pages about which sister, Mary or Anne, is older, and it doesn't really matter who's the eldest anyway. Throughout the book, she seems more interested in criticizing other historians' assertions than writing about Mary. And she writes considerably more about Henry VIII than she does about Mary Boleyn, despite the title.

A friend of mine saw me reading this book and asked me, "Why waste your time on Mary Boleyn?"

"You think she's a waste of time?" I asked (yes, clever, I know. I'm prized for my witty repartee).

"Yes," said my friend.

She was right.