Victoria

Author: Daisy Goodwin

Read: 02/13/2017

Pages: 404

Rating: 5/5

Format: Physical book

Book Description: "They think I am still a little girl who is not capable of being a Queen." Lord Melbourne turned to look at Victoria. "They are mistaken. I have not known you long, but I observe in you a natural dignity that cannot be learnt. To me, ma'am, you are every inch a Queen." In 1837, less than a month after her eighteenth birthday, Alexandrina Victoria - sheltered, small in stature, and female - became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland. Many thought it was preposterous: Alexandrina - Drina to her family - had always been tightly controlled by her mother and her household, and was surely too unprepossessing to hold the throne. Yet from the moment William IV died, the young Queen startled everyone: abandoning her hated first name in favor of Victoria; insisting, for the first time in her life, on sleeping in a room apart from her mother; resolute about meeting with her ministers alone. One of those ministers, Lord Melbourne, became Victoria's private secretary. Perhaps, he might have become more than that, except everyone argued she was destined to marry her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. But Victoria had met Albert as a child and found him stiff and critical: surely the last man she would want for a husband…

Response: This was a very good book! I enjoyed every minute of it and finished it in a couple of days because I was so hooked. I couldn't put it down! The story was written wonderfully about Queen Victoria when she first became queen and how much she relied on Lord Melbourne. Then the progression to falling in love with Prince Albert and how much he was a serious personality, and a lit bit of an asshole, mixing with her carefree, and even a little childish, ways. It was the perfect historical fiction and everything I had hoped it would be.