Book #2

Kate: The Future Queen by Katie Nicholl
384 pages

I have a huge, not-secret girl crush on Kate Middleton. She's just so glamorous! So effortless! So beautiful!

This book appeared on my library's new book shelf and I grabbed it without thinking twice about it. I was especially excited when I realized that it was so new that it included information about Baby George's birth from this past summer.

Almost as much as I love Kate, I also love biographies. This used to not be the case, but I read a Judy Garland biography several years ago that blew me away, and I am now reading several biographies a year. Just last year, I read a book about Queen Elizabeth, which taught me a lot about the royal family and how the structure works within today's society.

After I brought Kate home, I started thumbing through it (OK, I had to look at the picture inserts first ...) and was wondering if I would actually learn anything about Kate at all, considering I have watched practically anything American TV has put out about her in the last five years or so. But I was pleasantly surprised.

While this is not hard-hitting journalism or even a very serious biography on Kate, I definitely enjoyed it. I learned a lot about Kate's pre-royal family life, including interesting aspects about how her parents became self-made millionaire business owners in just a few short years. I knew her family was self-made money, but I was unaware of how quickly all of the business luck and savvy paid off.

I also enjoyed the tidbits of how Kate and William almost met many times throughout their young life (including actually briefly meeting at a party when they were teenagers). It may be silly, but any more that adds to the fairy-tale story is good for me!

I loved the descriptions of the royal wedding, especially since I was one of the millions of Americans that Nicholl writes about who woke up at the butt-crack of dawn to watch their vows. My favorite scene from the whole book is Nicholl describing Kate, after the royal wedding and celebration, in bed in robes with her sister Pippa watching the TV playback of her own wedding from earlier that day. This made me laugh, as it is probably something my sister and I would do if we were in the same circumstances!

Many of the details seemed less fact-based and more observation or opinion-based. But was I expecting this to be the greatest book I'd ever read? No. And I enjoyed the fluff of it all!

Next up: The Little Women Letters by Gabrielle Donnelly