Anne Boleyn and Me

Firstly, not a super favorable view of Anne in this imagining. The main character is Elinor Valjean, and her diary starts out when she is eleven years old. It is not favorable towards Anne because Elinor is the daughter of one of Catherine's ladies-in-waiting. So there is a born bias there. The book starts out pretty quickly aging the character up with the shorter entries of her much younger years. It shows her sympathies with Catherine through her wording and more attention to her then to Anne. There is of course some adult themes that are glossed over without any in depth explanation (childbirth, how to become with child ect) which is of course to be expected in a book towards younger children. I did enjoy this "blast from the past" as I had desperately wanted to read this as a child but they did not have it in our libraries. Would recommend for younger readers who are interested in The Tudors but are not quite ready for all that happens.

If you like this you may like My Tudor Queen (My Story) and other books from the My story series set at this time, such as The Bloody Tower: A Tudor Girl's Diary, 1553-1559 (My Story) and its sequel, To Kill a Queen: An Elizabethan Girl's Diary 1583 -1586 (My Story) and of course there is the Dear America series and the Dear Canada series.

I am an older reader and bought this book, not knowing it was a book for children and young adults. However, I read it with great enjoyment-- easy to read, entertaining, even for someone in my age bracket. I've since bought other books in the "My Story" series, and all the ones I've read have been very good. Even older people sometimes can enjoy reading simpler, more straight-forward children's books, and I certainly enjoyed this one.

This book is one in the My Story series. The books in this series are fictional diaries of young girls living during different periods of British, Scottish, and Irish history. Elinor Valjean begins her diary in 1525, when she is eleven. As the daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of England, she has grown up at court. Over the next few years, Elinor describes her daily life living among royalty, and how she eventually becomes a lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn. Elinor and her family sympathize with Queen Catherine because of their ties to her. But Anne Boleyn is determined to be queen, and King Henry VIII is determined to divorce Catherine, because she has failed to provide him with a son and is now too old to have any more children. But as Elinor's life becomes happy, as she grows up, falls in love, marries, and has children, Anne's only becomes worse, as she ends up disappointing Henry by failing to provide a living son. This is my favorite book from the My Story series, and I highly recommend it to readers who are interested in the Tudor era or who enjoy historical fiction in diary form. I loved the setting, the historical detail was fascination, and Elinor was a likeable narrator.