The Queen's Holiday

by Margaret Wild

When the Queen and her entourage go to the beach, the Queen takes charge in no uncertain fashion

Genres: Picture Books, Childrens

1 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1992

About the author

Margaret Wild is one of Australia's most highly respected picture-book creators whose award-winning children's books are loved by children all over the world. Margaret has published over seventy picture books for young children and she has been the recipient of the Nan Chauncy Award and the Lady Cutler Award for her contributions to Australian children's literature.

Reviews

[Manybooks · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, but for both my adult reading self and even more so for my inner child The Queen’s Holiday (1992) has not AT ALL been enjoyable. For indeed, if Margaret Wild’s presented text is supposed to be humorous, then The Queen’s Holiday is absolutely unsuccessful with this endeavour, as in my humble opinion The Queen’s Holiday really and truly is totally and utterly unfunny, with Wild’s joking writing and storytelling feeling artificial, dragging and basically often just seemingly consisting of annoyingly frustrating lists of totally ridiculous objects an anonymous, arrogant queen and her equally entitled entourage are taking along on their trip to the beach (including a chamber pot and what is needed to make a traditional British high tea), and strangely enough, with the destination of The Queen’s Holiday, with the beach seemingly being rather unimportant and almost a total and strange afterthought.

So considering that on Open Library, one of the main subject shelf headings for The Queen’s Holiday is BEACHES, well, it sure is kind of problematic at best how going to the beach is maybe the final destination of the queen and her diverse underlings, but not really all that important in and of itself. And while there are perhaps a few extremely small instances of (really grudgingly considered by me) pieces of humour encountered in The Queen’s Holiday, like the role reversals where the queen of the book title is depicted by Margaret Wild as making high tea and doing chores instead of the maids and valets, this is all feeling so textually forced and so not at all like a going to the beach type of picture book that my reading reaction to The Queen’s Holiday has been one of total disappointment and of finding pretty much everything regarding The Queen’s Holiday ridiculous and intensely so.

Combined with the fact that I personally also do find Sue O'Loughlin's accompanying artwork for The Queen's Holiday majorly aesthetically ugly and with me also being left wondering if O'Louchlin is perhaps trying to cast illustrative, visual criticism and disdain at the Queen of England with her pictures (since even though the depicted queen does of course not look at all like Elizabeth II, those corgi dogs encountered in The Queen's Holiday certainly look like her, like Elizabeth II's dogs), sorry, but for me, I do thus and indeed despise both Margaret Wild's text and Sue O'Louchlin's illustrations enough for me to only rate The Queen's Holiday with but one star.

[Meagan Hodges · Rating 5 out of 5]

A childhood favorite that I am sharing with my kids. They love this book.