Notorious Royal Marriages

A Juicy Journey Through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire

By: Leslie Carroll

Narrated by: Leslie Carroll

From the author of American Princess: The Love Story of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry comes a funny and delightful history of the royal weddings and marriages of Europe’s most famous—and infamous—monarchs.

Since time immemorial, royal marriages have had little to do with love—and almost everything to do with diplomacy and dynasty. Clashing personalities have joined in unholy matrimony to form such infamous couples as Russia’s Peter II and Catherine the Great, and France’s Henri II and Catherine de Medici—all with the purpose of begetting a male heir. But with tensions high and silverware flying, kings like England’s Henry II have fled to the beds of their nubile mistresses, while queens such as Eleanor of Aquitaine have plotted their revenge …

Full of the juicy gossip and bad behavior that characterized Royal Affairs, this book chronicles the love-hate marriages of the crowned heads of Europe—from the Angevins to Charles and Di—and ponders how dynasties ever survived at all.

©2010 Leslie Carroll (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Most enjoyable!

Lots of little juicy tidbits you won’t hear on a documentary on The History Channel. Makes you wish that Queen Victoria’s diaries and letters hadn’t been edited by her daughter or that Czarina Alexa hadn’t destroyed her diaries and love letters.

Wtf with the accents

The attempt at quotes using various accents and pronouncing names and places with accents is so bad, it makes the book almost unlistenable. It makes it very hard to focus on the story. The accents are downright awful and distracting.

Unfortunate narration, opinionated inserts

I really wanted to like this, and had been hoping for more interesting stories to go deeper into the relationship side of powerful marriages. There are some bits of that, but mostly it takes the easy road out of reiterating what we already know about inequality in marriages and insisting that women have been maligned throughout history, which is true enough but not what I was promised from the book's title and blurb.

Also, the narration is just flat out awful. It's incredibly slow -- I had to listen to it on 1.75 speed just to feel like I could follow it, which is higher than my usual listening speed -- and the narrator, who is also the author, oddly emphasizes phrases. There is also an attempt at various accents, some of which aren't too bad but many of which are just painful (especially the Italian ones). She also inserts a lot of opinion into the piece, often without substantiated sources behind it, so it comes across as "here is why I think the following misunderstood women were really mistreated geniuses" rather than a more persuasive argument of how they were successful despite popular modern belief otherwise. Some of the language used is also just jarringly... attempting to be hip? Going from badly-accented primary sources to claiming someone is "crazy like a fox" was just incredibly winceworthy.

It's a great idea, but the narration was just flat-out problematic and the opinions were really too much for me to enjoy it.