In The Shadow of Lions by Ginger Garrett

Like one of the characters says in this book, everyone's written something about Anne Boleyn. But this book is sympathetic towards her. This makes it rather strange for me, because my first introduction to her was through The Other Boleyn Girl, which was not a very flattering portrait.

In The Shadow of Lions has a very interesting narrative style. It jumps between the 'author' of the book an the actual story. Personally, I found this style distracting, I didn't care about the author (there wasn't enough details and she was forever justifying herself) and would have preferred to just read the 'historical' section alone.

In the historical part of the book, there is Rose (a, um, stained woman who received a second chance) and Anne Boleyn. What I don't understand, is how Anne Boleyn can be a 'good Christian' and believe in things like fairies. Likewise, other characters believe in things like Unicorns and such. I suppose though, that this was a heresy of the time.

Anne and Rose as characters.... well, I like Rose (although I didn't care much for the household she was in), and while I was initially prejudiced against Anne, she won me over by the end.

What I was really interested in though, was 'The Hutchins Book', in other words, The Holy Bible translated into English for the first time. That was really the part of the story that kept me reading. I felt that there wasn't enough in the court-section or the house-hold section to capture my attention or my heart. But the whole heretics and faith thing? Gripping.

Personally, the strongest point of the book was how it showed that by making Latin the "tongue of angels" and thus inaccessible to normal people, faith can be distorted. I really wasn't that interested in the plot, although since Rose and Anne are tied up in the book, they managed to grab my interest.

And out of curiosity  does anyone know why it's Latin that's the chosen language? I'm pretty sure the Bible was written in Aramic, Hebrew and Greek.