Author: Karen Harper
Published: May 19th 2020 by William Morrow
Format: eBook, 384 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
I should have known. When an author feels a need to outline the who’s who of a novel, even if it involves the royal family, the reader knows that they are in for a long drawn out narrative with overlapping names, this time nicknames, locations, and repetition. With historical fiction, the reader never knows what to believe. Did Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, keep a life-long secret from her husband regarding his brother, or was it the dossier that may not be truthful, or even the secret surrounding her birth, or was there something else that the reader lost sight of when the repetition took over?
Covering Elizabeth Bowles Lyon’s marriage to King George IV, the abdication of her brother-in-law, the raising of the future Queen, and living through WWII, Karen Harper takes the reader through the treachery, rewards, and battles that surrounded the royal family and the country. As the woman behind the man, Elizabeth with the help of Winston Churchill, takes on the role of a soft-spoken spine of steel matriarch that guided the King, and the country, to victory.
I wouldn’t call the book riveting or even fascinating, but it did bring a character, which I had dismissed, to the forefront and presented facets of her life that I had never known existed. Elizabeth was a woman of strength and secrets that was feared by the most powerful men of her day and who could hold her own during the most trying of times.
Covering Elizabeth Bowles Lyon’s marriage to King George IV, the abdication of her brother-in-law, the raising of the future Queen, and living through WWII, Karen Harper takes the reader through the treachery, rewards, and battles that surrounded the royal family and the country. As the woman behind the man, Elizabeth with the help of Winston Churchill, takes on the role of a soft-spoken spine of steel matriarch that guided the King, and the country, to victory.
I wouldn’t call the book riveting or even fascinating, but it did bring a character, which I had dismissed, to the forefront and presented facets of her life that I had never known existed. Elizabeth was a woman of strength and secrets that was feared by the most powerful men of her day and who could hold her own during the most trying of times.
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