The Queen's Fool By: Philippa Gregory

I get a huge kick out of historical fiction. In fact its probably in the competition for favorite genre (though how can you really choose right??). Though to be fair, I have only read historical fiction y Philippa Gregory for the last  several years.
Sadly I read the whole Boleyn series completely out of order (though to my credit she wrote the whole damn thing out of order). This novel takes place after Henry VIII dies and the throne passes to his daughter (with his first wife, Katherine), Mary, takes the throne.
It follows her fear in hiding, justifiably fearing her Father's rage and indecision about her rightful heritage and right to live. After his passing she courageously fights for right to the throne and her life. Really, she is straight up a bad-ass woman.
The book follows her fool closely, Hannah that is. She is a Jew fleeing the Spanish inquisition and goes into the court to earn some income to support her father and to offer them some means of protection. Hannah is also cursed with the gift of sight, or a  Through all the turmoil of a country in unrest, Queen Mary and Hannah go through lessons in love and life and the never ending toil of politics.
You really get to know these women and understand all the struggles they had to go through in that time period, but we know nothing about in our day in age. Mary worried endlessly about the fact hat her country needed a king but ho on earth could she choose a man to trust her country and heritage with? the whole while desperately trying to protect her half sister Elizabeth the daughter of Anne Boleyn who set all this turmoil in motion and has to live with the curse of not only her patronage but her mother's name as well. Hannah is stuck in an engagement to be married when she has not yet decided for herself what role her life will take. She fears being tied down by being a wife and mother though acknowledges her duty to her religion and father.
Hannah is loyal to her master (the one in charge of her employment) and loyal to both the Queen Mary and her sister Elizabeth. Her loyalties are tangled within each other and she becomes stressed and runs due to tension from the civil unrest in the country.
Its a beautiful and intriguing story. With all the different tensions and the personal account from each woman's point of view, the reader finds themselves drawn to each person in turn and when politics are involved you don't know who you want to pull through. Each character is so perfectly portrayed and you feel as if you really know them as a person and not just a character in a novel.
I look forward to reading the rest of her novels and strongly recommend her novels. (though please read them in their chronological order. Not the order they were written. It is so much easier to understand).