This is not really what I was expecting, and not in a good way. Like I genuinely found this pretty awful and it was only barely better than a one star. Erickson is a biographer first and came to historical fiction later in life, but to be honest, none of that influence shows here. She's not great at fiction (based on this book) but you also don't have the in depth historical knowledge that sometimes comes with such a background. So I'm not really sure what the positives would be.

For starters, this book is wildly inaccurate. I don't mind that, but I know some people do, so I figured I'd throw that out there. Mary has a secret daughter and has a whole thing where she runs away to Rome for a while and enjoys dressing up as a peasant. I dunno, it's weird. I don't mind when things in historical fiction are totally made up, but I felt like her actual story was way more interesting than the made up bits. Like if you're going to invent things, make them good and work well with the story.

The narrative was awful in that it basically didn't exist. This book very much felt like Erickson wrote out a timeline of events she wanted to cover in Mary's life and then wrote a scene for each bullet point on the timeline. There was no cohesion or development. It ran in chronological order, but that was about it. A scene would happen, we'd skip a few months and get a new scene where Mary would be in a new place doing something entirely different. And we'd get this awful little summary of the things we missed. It really was not structured well at all.

And I don't know how Erickson managed it, but Mary has no personality in this book. Like just taking a brief look at history, Mary Queen of Scots is not a historical figure who vibes as bland and boring. At all. I read a number of children's books about her as a kid and was so fascinated. Make a positive or negative person, she is fascinating. But in this book, she had basically no motivation. She wanted to rule Scotland. She wanted to usurp Elizabeth, kind of, sometimes. She loved Lord Bothwell mostly, except when other hot guys distracted her. But she wasn't wishy washy either, because that would have been too interesting. It was more like she was written to fit each particular scene, instead of having a strongly developed personality throughout the book.

I wouldn't recommend. Based on the reviews, Erickson has other historical fiction that is better, but I don't think I'll bother giving it a try. This book lacked everything, and I read it quickly just for the sake of getting it over with. I probably would have dnfed, but I am such a sucker for Mary Queen of Scots.