Cupid and the King: Five Royal Paramours Book

I was all set to give Cupid and the King three stars, when I found out that quite a bit of the information on Lola Montez was wrong. And what, I ask you, is the point of a biography which is wrong?

I thought I would fill in the author page for Lola Montez and just googled a couple of bits I couldn't remember from the book, only to find that several of the "facts" were inaccurate. Her birthplace? Wrong. Her date of birth? Wrong. The title and subject matter of a book she wrote? Wrong. I haven't attempted to verify any of the information in the other sections, but it stands to reason that if two minutes googling showed up the amount of inaccuracies that it did, it's likely a) that there are other mistakes that I missed, and b) that there are probably ones in the other sections as well.

The hillarious thing is the description: "filled with delicious details born of impeccable research". Impeccable? Really?

Three of the biographies are rather short - around 50 pages - and it is hard to get any kind of an accurate picture of someone in such a short space, particularly when much of the text was filler. That is not to say these mini bios weren't interesting, just that they were more synopsis than anything else. The other two were longer, perhaps as there was more information available. Unfortunately in the case of the section on Marie Walewska, this added length showed up the author's unexceptional writing skill. For a biography of Walewska, there were pages on end which did not mention her at all. There was so much extraneous material. Yes, we needed some basic information on Napoleon to place the story. But at some point the author* forgot she was writing about Walewska and started writing Napoleon's life story. This information was off-topic and irrelevant and although the section on Walewska was almost three times the length of the shorter sections, there actually wasn't a great deal more information on her.

Cupid and the King was mildly enjoyable, but evidently inaccurate and averagely written. If it's already sitting on your shelf then by all means read it, but definitely don't go out of your way to buy it.

NB: I read the updated 2006 version.

*I refuse to call her "Princess Michael". What, she doesn't have a name of her own? Surely she has some identity other than "Prince Michael's wife" for god's sake.