Ilasma Female, 27. Roma, Italy

Regretful is the most appropriate word to describe this. I was counting down pages while I was reading, looking forward to get to the end (it seems I can't leave a book without finishing it). Too hurried and chaotic, you are always waiting for the gist of the story, but you never get it. Furthermore, there are a lot of typos. Total waste of money.

It's not the first biography I've read about the last Queen of France, and of course I had my History during my school years, so I did know what I was going to read. Still, while I travelled through pages and those fatal decades of XVIII century, I couldn't help hoping for a different turn of events: this time the rulers won't commit the same mistakes and misjudgements, the Revolution won't allow itself the same excesses, the story will end another way. This is weird, isn't it? Even stupid. Truth is, Marie Antoinette's life and personae are so charming that they are not only the perfect matter for books and movies, but they could be a novel themselves, with no need to change even a comma; my mind was probably thinking to be in front of a work of fiction, hence the happy ending I was hoping for. As far as this biography is concerned, I feel I have to agree with those who say that, basically, Lady Fraser has done a huge collecting job. In my opinion, the most valuable aim she has reached with her work is drawing again attention upon one of the most mistreated and misunderstood figure in history, one who has still a lot to tell (and who, incidentally, didn't deserve the biopic offered by Sofia Coppola). I'm not saying this is a bad result; just that, together with Fraser's work, even her own sources shouldn't be forgotten and should get their place in the sun.

...woah! I need a while to recover and digest, since I finished this very moment. First word that comes to my mind is heartbreaking: a work of fancy couldn't have been better, it wouldn't have had the same sense of doom.
I wasn't as struck by finishing a book since I read Atonement, with two massive differences: Ian McEwan's masterpiece (in my opinion, at least) is a work of fiction, and in Loomis' essay there isn't any twist, since we all know how the story ends. Yet The Fatal Friendship is as engaging as a novel.
I bought this book out of curiosity after reading Riyoko Ikeda's manga Versailles no bara and now it is definitely among my favourites. Maybe it's not the definitive biography about Marie Antoinette (actually it's the only one I've read, but my next purchase will be Antonia Fraser's and I plan to read others), but it is indeed an impressive account of a friendship (or maybe something more) that lasted a lifetime and beyond, a relation that can't but enchant with its dramatic, even tragedy-like implications.