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(More customer reviews)Ginger Garrett's "In the Shadow of Lions" tells the story of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 16th century England. She tells her tale through two main characters. The first, Rose, a fictional creation, is a despairing young woman ready to give up on life. The second is Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry the Eighth. Their stories are dictated by a supernatural being called the Scribe to a dying woman in the present day.
I found this book to be a frustrating, unfulfilling read. A major flaw in the novel is the portrayal of Anne Boleyn. I've read many, many books about Anne over the years, both fiction and non-fiction. Anne Boleyn was a woman who not only fascinated a king, but has also fascinated historians and readers in the centuries since her death. In Garrett's portrayal, she's a rather flat and uninteresting character. I never got a sense of why Henry became so obsessed with her or how she was able to keep his devotion for so long. There was nothing to explain her allure. Henry himself never emerges as a very well defined character.
"In the Shadow of Lions" also contains the most negative portrayal of Sir Thomas More I have ever read. There's no doubt More could be virulently anti-Protestant, but this book takes his actions to the extreme. His daughter, Margaret, is an extremely inconsistent character, one moment treating Rose as an ally and at others treating her more as an enemy. I felt very removed from this book; it was hard to truly feel involved with the story or the characters.
There were many other things about this book that bugged me, but I'll just mention one more. Anne and Henry's daughter, Elizabeth, was born on September 7, 1533. In this book, Anne is two months pregnant shortly before Christmas. There's no way the timeline would work out for a September birth. Garrett never gives a date for Elizabeth's birth, but she does say she's born in winter. A woman can't be over two months pregnant in late December and give birth in a winter month unless the baby is extremely premature, which was not the case, or the baby is in the womb for over a year. I kept thinking I was missing something but I've read it over twice. It just absolutely makes no sense.
I suppose this book might be more appealing to a reader of Christian fiction than to a reader of historical fiction. The historical oddities, at any rate, might be less off-putting.
I really wanted to like "In the Shadow of Lions." I was looking forward to reading about Anne Boleyn from a different viewpoint, one that explored her role in the Protestant Reformation. Unfortunately, the poorly developed, inconsistent, and often unlikeable characters made this more of an exercise in frustration. One of the first things I noticed about this book was the beautiful cover. It's too bad the contents inside didn't live up to it.
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