Deborah Cadbury – 4/5 Stars
Read this if you:
· love your grandma but would never let her set you up with someone
· need another reason why it’s a bad idea to marry your cousin
· are interested in the early history of the royal family
Synopsis:
Queen Victoria was determined to have her 30-plus grandchildren married off into royal houses across Europe in order to strengthen their dynasty. Her grandchildren, however, had other plans to follow their hearts into marriages of love. Further complicating things were war and revolutions ravaging throughout Europe and eventually leading to the ultimate demise of all her plans.
My thoughts on the book:
Queen Victoria was a terrible matchmaker. The End.
Aside from the fact that she tried to set up all her grandchildren with each other (I’ll let this slide since times were different), her matches were unsuccessful for the most part. I would recommend going into this one with some knowledge of the different Royal families or you’ll have to google a lot of who’s who like I did.
Besides loving how little all the grandkids cared about who the Queen wanted them to marry, seeing the ultimate unraveling of the different monarchies across Europe was so fascinating. I really enjoyed reading about the early years of some of the most important leaders of that time.