Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The first thing that jumps out of this book is the writing style. Anyone who has written for a newspaper, magazine, or any media/journalistic publication will know the writing style that reporters are trained to use: active voice, moderate sentence length, letting quotes tell the story. This book may say it’s written by a journalist, but it doesn’t read like it (although the authors’ acknowledgements at the end of the book do read like a professional wrote them; they also sound nothing like the rest of the book). What it does read like is “The Tig” and - to some degree - Markle’s stream-of-consciousness earlier blog “The Working Actress.” One suspects the Sussexes weren’t consulted much because Megan simply wrote the whole book herself. I’d give two stars because it is an interesting look at how the wheels of the royalty machine turn - the politics, the offices and employees, the travels between palaces and sites. That’s a different lifestyle and most accounts are so gushingly intimidated as to share nothing. This book seems a bit less impressed and occasionally dips into pragmatism as it discusses planning, organizational hierarchy, staffing, etc. I did enjoy those insights. What the book is impressed with is Megan. It’s so impressed with Megan as to be diagnosable. I suspect this book of hiding in the bushes outside her bedroom window, sending her love letters with its fingernail clippings in the envelope. The level of Megan obsession - as she is repeatedly described as beautiful, flawless, giving, philanthropic, peeing in the African brush without a hair out of place, loved and adored by all who see her flawless poise- in this book is truly creepy. If someone else did write it, and if they were friends with Megan before, she has a restraining order against them now (and not just for stalking her toilet habits in Africa). The one insight that one takes away from the book is that Kate’s rise in life and the royal family is probably due as much to knowing which people to avoid as it is knowing who to befriend. And when you finish this book, you understand why she avoided Megan. And you don’t particularly blame her.