Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

To begin, the author has done an outstanding job of research, compilation, and organization. Quite a balancing act with multiple subjects, and the author has superbly achieved her feat. This said, the biography has too many serious flaws for it to be given the rave notices of most reviewers. I'm afraid most readers are too enchanted by the fascinating lives of these highly unusual women and, thus,have not critically approached the book. The author has provided us with a literary tea party with her subjects, but other than the superficial facts of their lives, she has provided us with only an elementary analysis or understanding of who and what they were, and more importantly, how and why they got that way. Perhaps a more thorough grounding in psychology could have benefited the writer in her profession. The unique characters of David and Sydney Mitford are the key to understanding their daughters. Both of them had troubled emotional lives that were fully transfered genetically and environmentally to their offspring. Sydney lost her mother at a very young age and emotionally "shut down" for the rest of her life. A paragon of virtue, totally devoted to her family, she was like a dead-pan, sonombalant iceberg. It must have been maddening to these six girls to have such an outwardly unfeeling, unaffectionate mother. Imagine how it must have felt to know that nothing you did, even threatening suicide by jumping off the manor roof, could ever do more than raise a polite and tranquil eyebrow of your mother and elicit only a supremely detached and blaise reaction. And the father - even as a boy it seems apparent that he had mental problems - just not eccentricity - but blind rages that alienated him from his boyhood family. As a father, David deeply loved his children but completely undermined them by his relentless volcanic fits of rage. His good side was his sharp, sarcastic humor which amused his children, but sadly taught them that it was the only acceptable vehicle for expressing their emotions. Thus, the four famous daughters adopted a sharp-tongued pose to hide their damaged emotions. There's way too much of these things to go into at any depth here. Suffice it to say, the author failed to give her subjects the psychological analysis and understanding that they were screaming for their entire lives. She also failed to give an objective view of the British caste system and way of life that helped create their attitudes, such as the emotional sterile childhoods of he upper classes that necessitates the life-long use of childish nicknames. Nicknames are almost a sub-theme of the book, but the author fails to note their importance in both helping to keep the users securely attached to their meager childhoods with their nannies in the nursery and also to perpetuate the upper class eliteness of having a private club with secret passwords - you know you belong because you use the ridiculous childhood nickname - thus today you could not be more upper class than if you referred to Her Majesty the Queen as "Lillibet". As for the technical, a good editor is screamed for here. The author has no gift for sentence construction or the usage of words. She loves introducing a sentence with a dependant clause that has nothing to do with the subject of the sentence. It is so often confusing and irritating - the reader has to skip back a few sentences to see what she's referring to. An example: "Indulging in these constant volcanic eruptions with loud shouts and dangerously flashing blue eyes, the house was not a pleasant place to be." Now, where's the editor? It's absurd that an author be allowed to drop or confuse her subject noun literally dozens of times in a book. And the sloppy choice of pronouns is also confusing and sometimes disastrous. When five or six women are previously mentioned by name, and then the author proceeds to refer back to one of them with the "she" pronoun, you have to almost disect the paragraph to figure out which she is being referred to. Like I said, a great researcher this author certainly is - a great organizer - but a very untalented writer, and, alas, a very mediocre biographer who lacks the skills of critical analysis and intellectual understanding to give these fascinating subjects the presentation that they truly deserve. But a worthy attempt. Once again, WHERE WAS THE COPY EDITOR?!