ROYAL DIARIES: Elisabeth

I always forget how incredibly dull this book is. Elisabeth is presented as a rather contradictory person. She is very, very, very vain. Not so much in the text of the book, but it is extremely clear that she had a major vanity issue in the epilogue and other sections at the back. However, she also has liberal views on politics (again, presented in the back) and loves horseback riding more than almost anything. And she's a poet! She's very multi-faceted. I honestly don't know how she did it, because how could the same woman who refused to leave her room if her favorite hairdresser was unavailable be comfortable riding a horse? She's also very picky about food to the point that she likely had anorexia, yet she worried constantly about her teeth. How did she let them get yellow enough to worry her if she's that vain?

I have little patience for vanity on that scale. I preferred the girl at the beginning of the book, talking about how she'd rather be with her poetic father or riding a horse or playing with her menagerie than accompanying her older sister to meet said sister's potential future husband.

Who ends up being ELISABETH's future husband. The book takes a turn for the worse after she meets this guy. Then she ends up all boring lovey dovey, crying when he leaves after a visit, and blah blah blah. The only parts that were interesting after meeting him were the ones where she still showed concern about her older sister's rejection.

I think Elisabeth had an interesting and ultimately unhappy life, but a book written for children isn't going to capture that. It wouldn't have been very appropriate for the line to talk about how she hated the rigidity of Viennese court, how her mother-in-low was a control freak bitch who wouldn't even let Elisabeth be with her own children for long, how her weak ass husband didn't stand up for the poor SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD he dragged into this unhappy marriage, the scandal when one of her sons killed himself and his mistress, and how Elisabeth herself was murdered at age sixty. Her story is interesting indeed, but this is not the right format for it.