Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the contents of my review.
I’m so glad I took a chance on this one and requested the ARC. It was so much fun! It avoided literally everything that usually makes me avoid reading biographies: the tedious linear structure, the grandiloquence and navel-gazing that comes with writing about a much-lauded (or controversial) figure (and the author trying to “earn it”), and to be honest, the dull bits. Q: A Voyage Around the Queen is not a standard biography, so despite my having called it one, make sure your expectations are set properly. We don’t get any primary sources from the Queen herself, we don’t get much behind the scenes input of decisions of state or politics of any kind. What we DO get is a series of primary sources from everyone but Lilibet herself, and not necessarily the people you would expect.
This isn’t so much a book about Queen Elizabeth II, but a book about how she affected the world around her throughout the 70+ years of her rule (and some before that as well). Here are two examples of what you will get with this book: 1) There is an entire chapter of people’s dreams about the Queen, which Brown seems to have sourced from a multitude of places (my favorite was the writer Kingsley Amis’s); and 2) There is a chapter devoted to the thwarted ambitions of a woman who desperately wanted to be one of the Queen’s Ladies in Waiting (which I did not know was still a thing!!). We see her diaries as a young girl, and that she’s still obsessing about it as an elderly woman. The chapter on the Coronation was a real treat, from the noble who attended out of spite while holding a 103+ degree fever, to a ten-year old Paul McCartney, who won an essay contest about the Queen’s impending reign.
The best thing about this format is that he gets so many opinions and stories from so many different places that the reader can form their own picture and opinions of the Queen. I do not give a fig about the monarchy or the royal family, but this was a really good read. Will definitely be checking out more books from this author.
And I didn’t even get around to talking about the extensive corgi lineages!
CBR BINGO: Golden (the whole book is an examination of the facade of a royal, who frequently wears gold, including on the cover of the book!)
