Craig Brown has no love for Princess Margaret. Although, based on the way he's portrayed her, I can see why.

My context for Princess Margaret almost exclusively comes from The Crown, but after Nicole Cliffe tweeted a series of tidbits from this book I knew that I had to read it. It delivered, but it took a bit of a dive to get there.

Brown does some weird things. He gets abstract, writing chapters of "what-if" timelines -- the worst undoubtedly being what if a 80-year-old Picasso seduced and married PM. There are a few odd chapters written in third person limited like some kind of weird historical fiction. The opening is fantastic -- a series of press release sort of things from the Royal Family essentially creating a timeline of Margaret's life. It's sort of bittersweet. One person's whole life collected in half a dozen or so brief statements. "Born, married, babies, divorced, stroke, died."

This isn't a history book. It's sort of a collection of gossip and anecdotes, some of it with documentation, some of it from famous mouths, some it from servants who, as PM put it, "sneaked."

That said, it is terribly interesting. Princess Margaret probably has more thorough, academic biographies out there that don't spend the majority of the book portraying their subject as petty, hard-headed, prideful of their status. But this is a wonderful laugh and makes me appreciate this strong-willed woman. She's the embodiment of the rich girl in those boarding school settings of YA novels, and I utterly adore her. What a icon.