The Plot to Kill the Queen

As someone who completely devoured and loved the first My Lady Jane novel, I was enthralled to see The Plot to Kill the Queen by Deborah Hopkinson come across my desk. Part theatre, part history mystery, with remnants of My Lady Jane and the Midwife’s Apprentice, I was game!

Emilia Bassano is a court girl, raised by society if not her family (her father has passed) and is enlisted in a spy scheme by the Queen’s Spymaster to play music for the imprisoned Mary Queen of Scots and find out if she’s conspiring to kill Queen Elizabeth. Emilia is determined to find out what’s going on, which often means sneaking around, befriending Mary through the expert deployment of her dog, Mouse, and getting to know the servant girls as well as the ladies of court. All the while, Emilia is hoping to write her own play and enter a play competition.

By the time the book ends, despite having been in a “three act structure” with scene breaks and description of what an aside means, etc, you’ll almost have forgotten that Emilia wants to be a playwright. It’s a very very tangential part of the story, and really only deployed to make the narrative structure unique, and to set things into motion at the playhouse.

Emilia as a character is interesting, and has a good voice, but the side characters never get their chance to shine. I liked the setting, but wanted more of it and less of the “see, I know theatre terms!” asides. It got old, especially after I realized how unimportant it as. Overall, I was a little disappointed by this book. I wanted it to be pithier and more detailed than it was, but it felt like Hopkinson put the details in the wrong place.

What I did love was how the title changes perspective throughout the book—you begin, as Emilia does, thinking this is about a plot to kill Elizabeth, but by the end, you realize it’s all been a plot to kill Mary. It’s a sly way of teaching about a historical moment we often see in pop culture, and possibly the first introduction to this real story that middle grade readers will get. The inclusion of theatrical elements and Shakespeare makes it almost curriculum adjacent.