Not Bad as a Background Soundtrack to Age of Empires II

I have a three-month-old son, and one of the ways we often spend our afternoons is with him napping and me playing on the computer. I can knock out a round of Age of Empires II in an hour, and I often put on an audiobook (usually of a book

 I’ve read before, so I don’t have to pay much attention) and listen throughout my game 

and for the rest of the afternoon when the little buddy wakes up.

I put my Audible membership on pause recently (that unpaid maternity leave life) and randomly chose three audiobooks from my Goodreads to-read list to get with my credits before I did so. Daughter of Empire, by Lady Pamela Hicks, had been on that list because I love memoir and I have an unhealthy fascination with the British monarchy and aristocracy.

Lady Pamela Hicks is the daughter of Lord Louis Mountbatten and his glamorous wife Edwina; the first cousin of Prince Philip and a former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. This memoir covers her privileged childhood as the daughter of aristocrats (her father became the last Viceroy of India and its first Governor-General) and her stint as lady-in-waiting to then-Princess Elizabeth on some of her first royal tours.

It’s a fluffy book, skating over the edges of the real political tensions and problems present at the time, but it was competently and interestingly narrated by Corrie James and was an easy listen. Daughter of Empire (which easily could have been called Daughter of Privilege) is an interesting lens with which to view some of the major changes and tensions of the 20th century. It’s not a book to read or listen to if you’re looking for any real substance, but if you like glamour in your memoirs, you could do worse.