Katheryn emerges from the pages of this beautifully realized portrayal as beguiling, vivacious, and, in the end, tragically naive. I was completely gripped from the first page to the last. But Katheryn has a past of which Henry knows nothing, and which comes back increasingly to haunt her-even as she courts danger yet again. If she can bear him a son, her triumph will be complete. She comes to love the ailing, obese king and tolerate his nightly attentions. Katherine delights in the pleasures of being queen and the power she has to do good to others. He tells the world she is a rose without a thorn, and extols her beauty and her virtue. Seated near him intentionally by her ambitious Catholic family, Katheryn readily succumbs to the courtship. Although the king is now an ailing forty-nine-year-old measuring fifty-four inches around his waist, his amorous gaze lights upon the pretty teenager. In the spring of 1540, Henry VIII, desperate to be rid of his queen, Anna of Kleve, first sets eyes on the enchanting Katheryn Howard. Bestselling author and acclaimed historian Alison Weir tells the tragic story of Henry VIII's fifth wife, a nineteen-year-old beauty with a hidden past, in this fifth novel in the sweeping Six Tudor Queens series.
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