Review: "Bloody Mary" by Kristina Gehrmann

Bloody Mary by Kristina Gehrmann
English edition published July 2025 via Andrews McMeel
★★★★

You know the story. A princess is born—but because she's not a prince, she's not worth all that much, and neither is her mother. This is a graphic biography-come-novel about Mary I, which is to say that it's based in fact but throws in plenty of dialogue and thoughts and so on that can't be known.

This is a delight as a reading experience—doesn't shy away from the grimmer parts of life in the royal court in the 1500s (plenty of beheadings to go around), but the art is great, and Mary gets to be quite the complex character. I remember that when I read about Mary when I was a child, it was sort of in the context of Elizabeth, which is to say that Elizabeth was treated as the heroine, and Mary as a villain. I guess it was easier to distill that down for children's books. But here, neither Elizabeth nor Mary nor Edward is a villain: Mary resents that she is so easily displaced, but she does view her siblings as siblings, and they are so much younger than she is (Mary was seventeen when Elizabeth was born, and twenty-one when Edward was born) that she has a role in raising them. Here, Mary wants her due as a princess, but she means more to stay in the line of succession than to force her siblings out of it.

Then, too, there is the question of religion. Henry VIII split from the Catholic church, spawning the English Reformation; books in which Elizabeth is the (Protestant) heroine sometimes paint Mary as, you know, one of those backward Catholics, I guess because it's backward to not want your mother to be divorced and basically banished and yourself to be disinherited so that your dad can go chasing after the next hot young thing...? And of course in real life Mary's approach to religion was to burn a whole lot of "heretics", so it's impossible to be all that much of a Mary fan, but it's worth noting that a whole lot of royal life in the 1500s seems to have been about basic survival and ensuring your future.

How much of this is true to life is of course something we cannot really know. The book portrays Mary as smart and determined, with an incredibly strong (if sometimes misguided) moral compass—but also an intense and warring survival instinct. That's probably as fair an assessment as any, though gosh I wouldn't have wanted to be in Mary's crosshairs. This is probably one for teenagers and beyond (mostly because of violence, though there are also plenty of allusions to sex), but it's a good one.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.