Lady in Waiting

The rest of Lady in Waiting tells the story of Lady Jane Grey, the fifteen-year-old girl who became Queen of England for nine days in the tumultuous dynastic maneuvering of mid-sixteenth century Tudor politics, through the eyes of her seamstress, Lucy Day, alternately with the modern-day Jane's struggles to make sense of her life and find a purpose.
While both threads were well told and interesting, the biggest flaw of this book to me was the extreme tenuousness of the connection between them. I'm not a "time travel" enthusiast, but I would have been happy to see some in this case. The modern Jane never has a clue of what we are being told in the earlier story or even that the ring actually did belong to Lady Jane Grey, and her reasons for thinking so are weak beyond believing for me, at least. I did, however, like the letters at the end which trace the history of the ring, and the book in which is eventually hidden, through the centuries.