Status Updates From The Queen's Secret: A Novel...

Funny how earlier in the book, I thought Elizabeth was unfairly pining for David (Prince of Wales).

Now that she has revealed (only to the readers, not to her husband) the secret having to do with David (Prince of Wales), I realize there’s no love lost between them after all, and I can better believe that she cares for Bertie after all.

Is she ever going to tell Bertie?

David, Prince of Wales, how could you?! 😤

Elizabeth, you are indeed better off with dear Bertie. What an upstanding man.

Admittedly, I hadn’t given much consideration to the current Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with Prince Philip.

I guess because they have essentially always been together during my lifetime … I just figured it was a relatively troublefree marriage. I am thus surprised to read that the Queen Elizabeth who is the subject of this book seemed against the young man when he caught Lilibet’s fancy all those years ago!

Elizabeth to Bertie: Winston has a tough constitution and you do too. Both of you arrange problems from greatest to least and attack them in that order.

😲

Mary and I sat … in the very room at Badminton where a former duke’s children in the 1860’s had been allowed to use light rackets to hit featherweight shuttlecocks in a game from India that had taken on the name of this grand house.

💡

We now have very serviceable airborne radar, day or night, entirely classified information… we have been bringing down more Luftwaffe planes even at night… and the enemy can’t figure out why. When asked by our press, our RAF boys just say they are eating more carrots, so they can see in the dark.

😆

I hadn’t realized the extent of the devastation in London during the bombings. Even Westminster Abbey and part of Big Ben were damaged. ☹️ Westminster Hall, the Houses of Parliament too.

Bertie to Elizabeth, speaking of her and Clementine (Winston Churchill’s wife): ha! You two “little women” - I imagine quite like Eleanor Roosevelt in the States - are more than the powers behind your thrones. I swear, you all prop up the men on them.

The night bombs keep us up, but they won’t get us down.

(Another sign from a bombed East End restaurant: More open than before)

If winter comes, can spring be far behind? This year it was far behind.

A poem from someone in Chicago to the Queen:

Be it said to your renown
That you wore your gayest gown
Your bravest smile, and stayed in Town
When London Bridge was burning down,
My fair lady.

Winston had given one of his energizing speeches last year thanking the RAF: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”

That the Prince of Wales, my husband’s brother, had so resembled dear (older brother by 11 yrs) Fergus that I suppose that’s why I once loved him from afar, and then up close?

Since this is the royal palace, the enemy means it as an assault on our nation, not just on us….But compared to the loss of entire homes - of lives of our dear people - this is a small thing. *Just glass and stones, not blood and bones.*

I still like Lilibet better. I want to grow up, but not sometimes.

☹️ Yup, we’ve all been so conflicted.

… British & Allied fighting forces & their armaments had been trapped on the French beaches of Dunkerque, which we British spelled Dunkirk.

… our gov’t put out a hue & cry for even small watercraft to rescue our soldiers & equipmt …

Oh! The recent movie!

…there was quite a scurrilous report explaining Wallis’s hold on poor David … It came to be called “The China Dossier” & was terribly titillating & sexual in nature - a smear from the days she lived in Hong Kong & toured China before her divorce from her 2nd husband.

😲

36

Love this book so much

40

Couldn't get into the plot and had to return it to the library. Might try again another time.

I’ve been reading this book off and on since, like, August. Time to finish!!!

Great book...recommend audiobook!!

Review coming shortly.