Gilded youth A history of growing up in the royal family: from the Plantagenets to the Cambridges

Biographer Quinn (Kensington Palace) contends in this fleet-footed if familiar history that the child-rearing practices of Buckingham Palace have "hardly changed in centuries." Opening in medieval times when wet nurses were the norm, childhood was brief, and nobles were used as "political pawns" through marriage or betrothal, Quinn makes the case that modern royals have endured "dysfunctional parenting" due to "fierce resistance" to change that has produced generations of troubled adults. Much of the book is devoted to the upbringing of the late Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, who benefited somewhat from being female and out of the line of succession until their father unexpectedly took the throne after his brother's 1936 abdication. The sisters were coddled by their "primary caregiver," nursemaid Margaret "Bobo" McDonald, and were only in the company of their parents one hour per day--a tradition they continued with their own children. The failed union of Elizabeth's son Charles and Princess Diana, described as "the last gasp of an ancient system in arranged marriages," has been eclipsed by their sons, who made love matches with commoners and aspire to be "hands-on" fathers. Incisive character sketches and a dollop of below-stairs gossip add entertainment to this thoughtful, well-documented study. Royal watchers, take note. (Dec.)

British author Quinn (Kensington Palace: An Intimate Memoir, from Queen Mary to Meghan Markle) argues that dysfunctional royal parenting traditions produced children who grew up to raise their own kids in a similar emotionally distant manner. Thus, he says, Queen Victoria, who lived in isolation with nannies as a child and was controlled by her widowed mother and Sir John Conroy, became a controlling mother of her own offspring. Quinn offers thorough research and "below-stairs" interviews with former royal staff and nannies, but one flaw in this book is its inclination towards conjecture, such as statements that Prince Charles was "probably born genetically predisposed to shyness and oversensitivity." Quinn devotes ample pages to Prince William, Kate Middleton, Prince Harry, and Meghan Markle and speculation about how their children will turn out, especially Archie and Lilibet, growing up in California as monied children who can't follow their parents into music, film, or modeling, as other Hollywood offspring do. VERDICT Scholarly in tone, yet gossipy at times. A solid but lackluster history of childrearing in the royal family over the centuries.--Denise Miller