Review: My Lady Jane

Title My Lady Jane (The Lady Janies #1)
By Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows
Genre Historical Fiction Romance
Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Synopsis
The (not quite true) story of Lady Jane Grey. Queen of England for only nine days.


First Sentence
The King, it turned out, was dying.

I read this one for several different reasons. First: It's Utah Book Week and it's written by three authors, one of which is from Utah, Two: My book club was reading it for August's meeting, and Three: I wanted to. It sounded amusing. I liked the idea of taking a historically sad story and rewriting it to be humorous, romantic, and happily ending.

Somewhere between hearing about this one and buying it and actually reading it, I had gotten the idea it was going to be overly cheesy and badly written. I was  (blessedly) wrong on all accounts. It was written very well. We got three perspectives: Lady Jane, (written by Jodi Meadows) Gifford (written by Utah Author Brodi Ashton) and King Edward (written by Cynthia Hand).

The story was fun and adventurous with lots of romance and nods to pop-culture like The Princess Bride, Monty Python etc. With all that maybe you can see how I thought it was going to be cheesy too? Maybe not but I was worried. It wasn't bad at all, however, the writing was well done and easy to read and I liked the story even if it did end a little too happily? *shrugs*

My only real problem with the book was the length. It was nearly five hundred pages and easily could have been cut down to around 300 and not lost much. That, and it's overly happy ending made this one likable but not lovable for me.

Should you read it
Yeah, I'd recommend it just be ready for that length!