Sibylla : En biografi by Roger Lundgren
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I had huge expectations for this book, as the author is renowned as a royal expert in Sweden, and Princess Sibylla is something I expect that he would have known quite a bit about.
I’m left with a conundrum, because the parts where he did cover Sibylla were okay enough. It is just a pity that there were so little of it.
The major problem with the book is that it is touted as a biography about Princess Sibylla of Sweden – and out of the 319 pages, over a third of it is used to describe various members of the Swedish royal family, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family, and almost everyone but Sibylla. In addition, the author jumps back and forth in history to the point where it ends up being annoying.
There is also a superficial aspect to the book where he focuses on everybody but Sibylla – she ends up being a supporting character in her own biography. He spends more time talking about the weddings of Sibylla’s children than he did with Sibylla’s own wedding, for example, and even then he barely mentions Sibylla in that context.
It is very clear to me that despite being a royal watcher, I am not the person this book is angled towards. It is written in a very chatty tone, where the author presumes to know what the cast of characters thought during various events, without supporting the thoughts with proper references.
Not at all a very impressive biography.
