Sex with Kings

Don't be fooled by my middle-of-the-road rating. This book was chock-full of gossip, tidbits and stories about old-timey royals' sex lives, intrigue and sexual politics, and it was a DELIGHT to read. I read some passages aloud to my husband because they were just too ridiculous to not share with someone, and it was such a fun experience.

The reason I'm only giving it three stars is because the organization of the book was kind of terrible. It was arranged around various themes, such as King's Bastards, Mistresses and Queens, The Husbands That The Mistresses Had to Abandon Randomly to Boink The King, etc. (I don't remember specifically what they were called, but that's the gist.) In the process, the book was constantly jumping from king to king, country to country, time period to time period, with the result that none of the mistresses — who were FASCINATING, by the way — ever really got “fleshed out” into a real character/person for me.

It was too hard to keep straight who was who, when they lived, which mistresses came in what order, what happened to them, the trouble they got into ... and it just turned into a series of anecdotes and fun stories for me, without giving me a better understanding of any one of them in particular. That was kind of disappointing, as I would have liked to have come away with some kind of knowledge about the individuals; beside the themes that were covered in general, I didn't come away with much knowledge about any one mistress, because I couldn't distinguish between, say, Madame du Barry, Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Pompadour.

Anecdotal historical fluff about royal mistresses. If there's such a thing as beach-reading history, this is it.