Superficial and irritating

I tried to finish this. I really did. But a combination of the following eventually had me bowing out of my efforts to get to the end:

(1) Bizarre pacing (for a book about Marie Antoinette, it tore through/ignored many key parts of her early life, then would get bogged down in trivial minutiae about court family trees that added nothing to the story).

(2) The book is not very well-edited: numerous grammatical errors (subject-verb disagreement being a particular bugbear) and a strange, oscillating, tone that swings between gossip magazine article and dry, scientific report. It doesn't read like an academic piece.

(3) Author has a heavy bias against Marie Antoinette - not to say she didn't have plenty of flaws, but the picture created by this story is that she was simultaneously stupid, flippant, conniving, manipulative, powerless, ignored and a deeply powerful, driving force behind a large majority of the king's decisions. If you are interested in Marie Antoinette, an incomparably better, and more nuanced, book is Antonia Fraser's 'Marie Antoinette: The Journey's. Though Fraser clearly comes from a very sympathetic position, her analyses are nevertheless well-researched, well-written, and much more balanced, compelling and insightful than any contained in this book.

(4) Perhaps the most annoying thing (which, to be fair, is outside the author's control): the narrator. It is a little odd, but not unbearable, that his voice and tone sound like he's reading a children's story. But what finally made me give up was his awful french pronunciation; one can only take so many "Mar-*FLEM*-ie Antoinette"s.

Save yourself and give this one a miss.

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