Novel Thoughts

THE ROSE WIHTOUT A THORN BY JEAN PLAIDY

Blurb
Bor into an improvished branch of the nobel Howard family, young Katherine is plucked from her home to live with her grandmother, the Duchess of Norfolk. The innocent girl quickly learns that her grandmother's puritanism is not shared by Katherine's free-spirated cousins, with whom she lives. Beauitful and impressionable, Katherine becomes involved in two ill-fated love affairs before her sixteenth birthday. Like her cousin Anne Boleyn, she leaves her grandmother's home to become a lady-in-Waiting at the court of Henry VIII. The royal palaces are exciting to a young gril from the country, and Katherine finds that her duties there allow her to be near her handsom cousin, Thomas Culpepper, who she has loved since childhood.

But when katherine catches the eye of the aging and unhappily married king, she is forced to abandon her plans for a lifew ith Thomas and marry King Henry. Overwhelemed by the changes in her fortunes, bewildered and flattered by the adoration of her husband, Katherine is dazzled by the royal life. But her bliss is short-lived as rumours of her wayward past come back to haunt her, and Katherine's destiny takes another, deadly, turn.

( The Review )

Rating: 5/5