The Queen's Lady by Barbara Kyle

From the author's website: Set in the nerve-jangled court of King Henry VIII during his battle with the Catholic church for a divorce, THE QUEEN’S LADY is the story of Honor Larke, a ward of King Henry’s chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and lady-in-waiting to Henry’s first wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon. Forced to take sides in the religious extremism of the day, Honor fights to save the church’s victims from death at the stake, enlisting Richard Thornleigh, a rogue sea captain, in her missions of mercy, and finally risking her life to try to save Sir Thomas from the wrath of the king.

Very nice historical fiction. It looked at the same time period as The Constant Princess but with such different emphases that it still felt fresh. The heroine, Honor, is a fictional character responding to the events of the times. I'm thinking that I might like that format more than the books that narrate through a historical figure but fictionalize their conversations and such. Honor's faith journey was a realistically depicted struggle - this was a terrible time for the Catholic church so we see Honor turn away from her own faith, tolerate, although never embrace, Protestantism, and then toy with atheism. The author documents the atrocities of both the Catholics and the Protestants during the time period. There was a secondary storyline about a mysterious book that Honor discovers at the start of the story. That never grabbed hold of me and when the author returned to it at the end to wrap it up, I wasn't interested. Overall, this was a good story, this is a genre I enjoy.