You think you know her story. You’ve read the Brothers Grimm, you’ve watched the Disney cartoons, and you cheered as these virtuous women lived happily ever after. But real princesses didn’t always get happy endings. Sure, plenty were graceful and benevolent leaders, but just as many were ruthless in their quest for power, and all of them had skeletons rattling in their majestic closets. Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe was a Nazi spy. Empress Elisabeth of the Austro-Hungarian Empire slept wearing a mask of raw veal. Princess Olga of Kiev slaughtered her way to sainthood. And Princess Lakshmibai waged war on the battlefield with her toddler strapped to her back. (Summary from Amazon)
History! Women! History about Women! Three of my favorite things!
I knew about some of the women mentioned in the book; Wu Zetian, Tomyris, Hatshepsut, Caraboo, and Christina. I knew a little about Wu Zetian from the video game Civilization V and Tomyris from the sequel Civilization VI. I knew a lot about Hatshepsut, the Egyptian Pharaoh. I even knew about Princess Caraboo from the 1994 film Princess Caraboo. It was an utter delight to to read about all the other princesses in this book and find out about their lives and even deaths. Princess Olga is my new favorite and I can only aspire to be that badass if the time comes.
I read a few of the other reviews on Goodreads, and no, this book is not a serious history book. There are plenty of those. This book gives you enough information to make you learn something, but allows enough to be left behind that it makes you google them to learn more. (I did anyway.) I'd recommend this book for a budding historian, a history lover who perhaps doesn't know all of these AMAZING (EDIT: I mean amazing in the sense that they defied convention of the time, because there were some women who were not...amazing people) women, or even someone like me; an author who now has a whole multitude of new ideas floating around in my head.
Luckily, if you want to know more and wikipedia is failing you, there is a bibliography at the end of the book that has plenty of material to keep you occupied for a long time. I know I'm going to check out a few of the sources and see what else I can learn about these astonishing, historical princesses.
I received a copy from NetGalley.
Here is an affiliate link to the book at Amazon, if you want to buy it:
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