I stayed up too late last night to finish reading The Other Boleyn Girl. It plays fast and loose with history and age of characters, but I enjoyed it, much like a historical movie alters facts for dramatic purposes. It was a good read with some good suspense in the last chapters. The author threw the character of Mark Smeaton under the bus in her narrative. The court musician was tortured until he confessed to adultery with Anne Boleyn and then executed with the other falsely accused men. For someone so prominent in the case, his one brief appearance in the novel, where he is implicated with all the other executed "lovers" of the Queen as part of a homosexual clique at court, struck me as strange.
