Review: The Crown: The Official Companion, Volume 1: Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, and the Making of a Young Queen

The Crown: The Official Companion, Volume 1: Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, and the Making of a Young Queen by Robert Lacey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Falling into a historical docudrama niche, Netflix's series The Crown, based on the early reign of Elizabeth II, has been popular and well-received. Meticulously researched, the series is an adaptation of high quality for the television audience. The Crown: The Official Companion, Volume 1 offers the reader a hybrid book, giving us the actual history and the history as it is presented in the Netflix show. The companion book provides a treasure trove of color and black and white images for both fans of the TV show and aficionados of the Windsor Monarchy. The TV series has succeeded in making us appreciate the Windsor family as real people with challenging and tightly duty-bound lives, in spite of their seeming fortune. It has been especially fine in developing the relationship between Elizabeth and Philip, and that of Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, against the backdrop of the prior family scandal with the abdication of Edward VIII. The Crown., The Official Companion, Volume 1 builds on these stories, delving a bit deeper into the history, offering us newspaper headlines of the day, and real images of royals. Showrunner Peter Morgan lends insight to the development of the series and his use of factual information to tell a compelling story for the TV audience.

It is as a transitional history book, on a path to interesting light readers in conventional history, that this book excels, drawing the reader in with its many photos of the actors in the series paired with real-life images of the Windsor family and grounding the Windsors in the context of world history. I could easily see asking students of Modern British History in a prep school setting to watch the series, read this book, and then read about the corresponding period in Sarah Bradford's popular and accessible Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times as part of a class project.

My only quibble with this book is that some double page photos are awkwardly bound in such a way that in at least one photo, (pp. 180-181) the image of Elizabeth is almost entirely cut off by the center binding. I would also have preferred to see that all photos of actors impersonating real people explicitly labeled as such. In a world where many people cannot even pick out photos or names of their leaders, I'm not sure that people will always distinguish between Claire Foy as an actress and photos of the true young Queen Elizabeth, sad as that may be.

Just as I look forward to season 2 of The Crown, (which Netflix releases December 8th, 2017) I will look forward to Volume 2 of the Official Companion series. I very much enjoyed reading Volume 1.

I received a free copy of this book from Crown Archetype, a division of Penguin Random House, in exchange for an honest review.

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