Veronica 🦦
Written on Aug 14, 2018
If you've read my review of The Accidental Empress or know me from other social media platforms, then you'd know that I am incredibly critical about historical fiction books that include Sisi and company. She is one of my favorite historical figures to read about and to study. She is interesting and just fascinating.
Does it introduce Sisi in a way that sort of captures her melancholy, her apprehension, and her mixed feelings about the marriage to Franz Joseph? Sure.
BUT!
This is yet another book that fails to capture Sisi. Although he did a better job than Pataki, Barry Denenberg struggled nonetheless to capture the voice of the fifteen-year-old Sisi. The writing leaves a lot to be desired. It was dull and quite painful to get through. I may as well have reread [b:The Reluctant Empress|983942|The Reluctant Empress|Brigitte Hamann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1387715893s/983942.jpg|969437] (which is spectacular by the way and a MUST read) because that book would have been far more exciting. Denenberg struggled with finding that sweet spot between narrative writing and just spewing off historical facts.
He did a better job with the epilogue and afterword than he did with the ACTUAL diary section. This is a perfect example of why it's so important to SHOW, DON'T TELL. All he did was tell, rather than show.
It's such a shame that if I was reading this book as a kid (or as someone with absolutely no clue to who Sisi was and her history and all that jazz), I'd put this book down and ask my mom to return it to the store (or to the library if I borrowed it).
To be quite frank? If you handed this book to me and omitted the author's name? I'd be able to tell it was written by a man. As I said above, he struggled to find that sweet spot of writing historical facts and telling a narrative story. He was writing facts after facts but didn't write enough about Sisi's emotions during this time. He managed to toss in a poem that Sisi never wrote until she was older and already married to Franz Joseph for several years, but somehow, he managed to miss the mark on her emotions. I couldn't feel any of Sisi's pain. It just felt like I was reading a badly written encyclopedia entry.
If anyone decides to use this format in the future, just get one thing straight: diaries aren't just a place to recount events of the day. Diaries are places where people can write their deepest, darkest feelings, thoughts, and desires. Diaries are where they can be emotional, where they can yell and scream on paper without ever actually opening their mouths to make a sound.
Denenberg failed to understand this concept. If the point of this series was to put kids in these women's shoes, then Denenberg missed the mark completely. This read more like an encyclopedia entry more often than not and even though Sisi was fifteen during this time, she was certainly someone who used words to express her pain and desires.
Unfortunately for Sisi, this is just another badly written historical fiction book that features her and it is such a shame because she is a fascinating woman.