A succinct insight into the life of Henry VIII's second Queen. Not much more to it than that really! At only 191 pages, this book guides you through the major events of Anne's life with very few frills, but with enough detail to allow the reader to immerse themselves in her world without becoming overwhelmed.

There is plenty of primary source material quoted within, which does add some sense of grounding in reality to this well known story. However, I was a little confused by the choice to present some of the quotes as they appear in the original sources, completed with barely-legible sixteenth century spelling, and yet others appear to have had their spelling modernised. There doesn't appear to have been any particular logic to which items were updated, and so I found it quite difficult to keep having to adjust my expectations. In particular, where the quotes form part of the narrative (as opposed to being set out as a proper extract), it's very jarring to go from modern English to Tudor English and back again in the space of a few words. Where this book feels like it should be an 'introduction' to the topic, in my opinion all of the sources should have been modernised for ease of understanding. 

I also found the writing to be quite dry. Given that Anne Boleyn is one of my favourite people to read about, and the fact this book is so short, I found it incredibly difficult to get through more than 40 pages at a time without feeling like I was about to fall asleep. Yes, Anne is the subject of innumerable books and her story has been told countless times, but in most cases the authors still manage to find a way to bring her to life in their pages, or find some angle of exploration that brings a new sense of her to the reader. In this case though, it felt like more of a straight regurgitation of facts and I felt so far removed from the 'character' at the centre of it all that there was just nothing to cling onto.

Coupled with that was the increasing frustration I felt at the continual repetition. There are many cases throughout the book where the author will set out a point or a turn of phrase, and then within a few sentences will repeat the same sentiment almost verbatim. For example, on page 141 she states "... she cannot have foreseen the rapidity of her fall...". Then, on page 143, only a couple of paragraphs later you find the phrase "... she can never have imagined the speed with which she would fall." I'm not sure whether it's a case of the author trying to hit a word count by padding out the writing, or if it just needs a really thorough edit. 

Strangely, I also found the layout of this book off-putting. Although it was published in 2009, the font and general format of the text feels incredibly old fashioned. The text size is very small, which made it harder to concentrate on, the top and bottom margins are very tight to the page, and the line spacing is also very tight, so at a glance you are presented with quite the wall of text on each page. It's not something that normally bothers me, but in this case it compounded the other issues I was having. 

There is nothing wrong with the information contained in here, but there are many, many better alternative reads to obtain it. One for the book swap pile, I'm afraid.