Full name: To Be a Princess: The Fascinating Lives of Real Princesses

Authors: Hugh Brewster, Laurie Coulter, Laurie McGaw Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: History, Biographies, Non Fiction Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780060294809 0060294809

Princesses live in splendid palaces with servants to grant their every wish....or do they? Here the stories of twelve real princesses reveal what life behind the palace walls is really like. "This night I think to die," declares Elizabeth Tudor as she shivers in the Tower of London in 1554. Her half sister, Queen Mary, sees her as a rival to the throne. But Elizabeth survives, and in four more years, she is queen. Two hundred years later, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette of Austria is told she will marry the heir to the French throne, whom she hasn't even met. She could never have imagined that the crowds who cheer her and her young husband will one day cry out for their blood.Princess Victoria is eleven when she learns she will someday become England's queen. Princess Ka'iulani of Hawai'i is told just the opposite. "You will never be queen," whispers her dying mother in an eerie prophecy. For Anastasia and her three sisters, daughters of the Tsar of Russia, home is a beautiful palace surrounded by gardens and lakes. But war and revolution will shatter their sheltered world forever. The world will also change for Ayesha Devi, daughter of an Indian maharajah, and for Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, the two little princesses of 1930s' Great Britain. And they change with it, setting the style that is followed by the princesses of today. Throughout this handsome book, elegant portraits and period artifacts and photographs complement the story of each princess and recreate the worlds in which they lived. Together, the lives of these young royal women tell a story more fascinating than any fairy tale. Similar books: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester Zeitoun by Dave Eggers Mobituaries by Mo Rocca Gandhi by Mahatma Gandhi The Greatest Game Ever Played by Mark Frost There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz The Life of Elizabeth I by Alison Weir The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen E. Ambrose Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy Walt Disney by B. G. Thomas Working by Studs Terkel Paul Revere's Ride by David Hackett Fischer Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt To the Golden Shore by Courtney Anderson Yeager by Chuck Yeager You Can't Win by Jack Black Joseph Fouche by Stefan Zweig