Jahanara's life is full of court intrigue and that takes up the majority of her diary. At the beginning, her father isn't emperor, but he eventually takes over and the two sons being held captive by the now Dowager Empress are returned to the family. The youngest had greatly changed and will grow into a nasty puritanical ruler who killed his brothers to take the throne. It's another of those tough books to read because you know what this bratty kid will do to his awesome older brother in the future.
The end of the diary feels very rushed, jumping periods of months and even over a year between entries. I think Lasky ran out of steam and just wanted to make it to Mumtaz Mahal's death at the end and didn't know what to say in between. Lasky gave us Mem, Elizabeth, Marie-Antoinette and Zipporah, some of my favorite voices from these series, so to see her drop the ball with Jahanara is frustrating. Also, based on skimming the reviews on Amazon, she got some things wrong research-wise. I wish they'd gotten an Indian historian to write this, instead of someone who had never even heard of Jahanara before visiting India. There are loads of books about the European royalty in this series, but they only did one about India, so why not make sure it's done right? Sigh. I definitely still like Lasky as an author, but she loses some respect for not doing enough research on this and not putting as much effort into Jahanara as she did her other books.
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