The Windsor Affair by Melanie Benjamin

The Windsor Affair by Melanie Benjamin

384 pages

Published June 2026 by Random House Publishing Group

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary: 

Feuding Windsor brothers and their wives—some things, it seems, never change. The Windsor Affair recreates the cataclysmic events that nearly toppled the monarchy and incited the power struggle between Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon and Wallis Simpson. Told from the perspective of both women, the novel propels readers into the fabulous world of the debonair Prince of Wales, café society of the 1930s, and the glittering private lives of the Windsors. The first novel to be dedicated to this infamous rivalry, The Windsor Affair brings us all the gossip and intrigue between the two very different—yet perhaps more similar than they would admit—wives of royals.

As Queen, Elizabeth would become the symbol of British pluck and courage during World War II and remain a British institution the rest of her long life. Wallis would be forever forced to enact the World’s Greatest Love Story even after it sours, as she goes from being admired to vilified and, ultimately, pitied. Against the backdrop of the Abdication Crisis, World War II, coronations, funerals, births, and deaths, these two women maintain a biting, sharp-tongued feud—until age and the long arm of history bring about a kind of understanding. For the last communication between these bitter rivals was a simple, surprising message: “In friendship, Elizabeth.”

My Thoughts: 

This is the eighth book by Benjamin that I’ve read and it gave me everything I’ve come to expect from her. Benjamin's books are always centered around real women who have played a role in history, two topics I love. Frequently they are women whose place in history has been overlooked; sometimes the women are very well known, as in this case. 

Over time, I've read a fair amount about Edward VIII (later known as the Duke of Windsor) and Wallis Simpson and I long ago gave up the idea that theirs was a great love story that stood the test of time. What I didn't know about was the feud between Simpson and Queen Elizabeth. 

Elizabeth was much beloved in England as the Duchess of York, after marrying Albert "Bertie", the Duke of York and second in line to the throne. Her hope was to remain in those roles for the remainder of their lives. It allowed them to spend a lot of time together and with their daughters and allowed Bertie to remain out of the spotlight, where his stammer would be less noticeable. 

The first in line to the throne, Edward, the Duke of Wales was a known womanizer, particularly when it came to married women. Wallis Simpson was American, once divorced, and, at that time, married woman who loved a good party, wore stylish clothing, and had a biting humor who set her sights on Edward. 

In January of 1936, King George V died and Edward became king. The family felt certain that Edward would do the right thing and walk away from Wallis, as it was inconceivable that he could remain king if he married her. Edward insisted that he could, and would, in fact do just that. In the end, he was not, as we know, allowed to marry her as king, abdicating the throne to Bertie. 

And here's what I didn't know about all of that: 

• Stylish Wallis looked down her nose at Elizabeth, who continued to wear clothing designed by the woman who had designed her mother's clothing, and made no secret of it. Elizabeth looked dowdy and was constrained by doing things the right (the royal) way. 
• Elizabeth had once been the apple of the public's eye; but the public, surprisingly, got caught up in the great love story and adored Wallis. 
• Elizabeth was very unhappy with Edward's abdication, putting Bertie, as it did, into a highly stressful and very public role that vastly changed both their private and public lives. 
• Wallis and Elizabeth publicly avoided each other as much as possible and their "feud" was very much public knowledge. 

And here's what I'm not sure if fact or fiction - was Elizabeth instrumental in making sure that Wallis and Edward were not allowed to marry if he remained king? Was she instrumental in making Bertie (King George VI) forbid the royal family from having any contact with Edward and Wallis? In Benjamin's world she did. Given what I know about the amount of research puts into each book, I can't help but think that there's some truth to those things in this book. Regardless, it makes for a wonderful tale of two strong women, neither of whom got what they ended up wanting out of life. 

Life: It Goes On - April 26

Happy Sunday! It's a cool, grey day here in Omaha, with rain in the forecast. But that's not going to stop me from getting outside and starting to plant all of the things I've picked up this week. When I tell you that I loaded up a big cart at the nursery yesterday without paying any attention to what I was spending, I want you to understand that I may need to take on a part-time job over the summer to make up for it! But the minute I started putting tomatoes and herbs onto my cart, my mood lifted. Then I headed in to start getting the pretties and I spent an hour pulling together a color scheme. I can't wait to see it all come together and then to be able to read on the patio surrounded by beautiful plants. 

Somewhere in there, I need to crank out some book reviews. I am so far behind and finishing two books almost every week. Think the next few weeks' reviews will be not much more than bullet points, but I want to get them written before I forget my feelings about the books. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished Jess Walter's So Far Gone and started Allen Levi's Theo of Golden. 

Watched: College baseball, softball and spring volleyball. Also, we've been watching Masterpiece PBS's The Count of Monte Cristo, starring Sam Claflin. It's so good and has me wondering if I should devote my summer reading to finally tackling that beast of a book. Have you ever read it? 

Read: Elyse Myer's That's A Great Question, I'd Love to Tell You and I started Amanda Peters' The Berry Pickers. 

Made: Not a whole lot this week. Between leftovers we ate on Monday, dinner out, and catch-as-catch-can meals worked around events, it wasn't a week for cooking. 

Enjoyed: Lunch with friends last Sunday afternoon, getting my hair done Wednesday, and the quarterly siblings dinner with the Big Guy's family on Friday night. 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: On lots of planting. 

Thinking About: Politics. 

Feeling: Lighter. The astrology folks tell me that Scorpios are coming out of seven rough years and this weekend is the turning point. I've never been a believer but I know that past seven years have been extremely difficult. So if life starts to really pick up now, I'm going to have to rethink that position. 

Looking forward to: Getting my hands in the dirt. Can you tell I'm a bit obsessed with this gardening business? 

Question of the week: I finished that latest season of Bridgerton the other night and need something to watch on the evenings when BG is out. For some reason, I tend to watch lighter stuff on those nights, things I would never pick up in book form. Got any recommendations? 

Kin by Tayari Jones

Kin by Tayari Jones

368 pages 

Published /2026 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher’s Summary: 

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

My Thoughts: 

The Atlantic reviewer says “…Jones gives the novel the…sense of inevitable tragedy that animates Edith Wharton’s books.” As a huge fan of Wharton’s work, that would drawn me to this book. But I already knew that about Jones, having read her 2018 novel, An American Marriage. That’s the mark of a good writer – I know I’m going to have my heart broken in the end, but I want to read the book anyway. 

Vernice and Annie are more than best friends, they are sisters, inseparable no matter what the physical distance between them. Both were raised by women who were forced to mother the girls and who were afraid to bond too closely with the them. Because of the way they each became motherless, and the they were raised afterward, they are two very different people who seek healing in very different ways. 

Annie escapes town, headed north to find the mother who abandoned her. Annie doesn’t see that the people she travels with and meets along the way as a family and can’t accept the love she finds, so consumed is she in trying to finding her mother. It’s an obsession that comes with a high cost. 

Vernice escapes through education and makes her way to college in Atlanta There she meets her first love and people who will open her eyes to the Civil Rights movement. When a well-to-do woman takes Vernice under her wing, though,Vernice is convinced that the way to succeed is by marrying, settling down, and doing the "right thing." The woman becomes the mother Vernice has been seeking and soon becomes her mother-in-law as well. 

When Annie finds herself in trouble,  it's Vernice she turns to, despite  and Vernice finds that taking care of Annie is more important to her than following the rules set by society. 

Jones is one of those rare authors that makes you feel like you're in the room with these women. You can feel the emotions of the characters and see them clearly; you can picture the rooms and the roads; you can feel the tension, the fear, the nuances of the characters. Here is a story of grief, sadness, obsession, family and love that, despite the sadness the overwhelmed me throughout the book, made it impossible to put this book down. 

The Usual Desire To Kill by Camilla Barnes

The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes

256 pages

Published April 2026 by Scribner

Publisher’s Summary: 

Miranda’s parents live in a dilapidated house in rural France that they share with two llamas, eight ducks, five chickens, two cats, and a freezer full of decades-old food.

Miranda’s father is a retired professor of philosophy who never loses an argument. Miranda’s mother likes to bring conversation back to “the War,” although she was born after it ended. Married for fifty years, they are uncommonly set in their ways. Miranda plays the role of translator when she visits, communicating the desires or complaints of one parent to the other and then venting her frustration to her sister and her daughter. At the end of a visit, she reports “the usual desire to kill.”

This wry, propulsive story about an eccentric yet endearing family and the sibling rivalry, generational divides, and long-buried secrets that shape them, is a glorious debut novel from a seasoned playwright with immense empathy and a flair for dialogue.

My Thoughts:

I recently went to pick up library holds that had come available and was surprised to find this title among my books. I had no recollection of requesting it, no idea who might have recommended it, and no idea why I would have requested a book about killing. I was only a few pages into the book when I became even more confused. This certainly didn’t feel like a book that was headed down the path of becoming a murder mystery. So, I did something I almost never do – I looked at the front flap to get the book description. And then I proceeded to race through this book. 

This is the story of how two people who should never have been together maneuver thru a long marriage and the effects that has on their children. Barnes explores marriage, sibling rivalry, truths behind shifting memories, and family secrets as well as examining the decisions people make in life, the long-term effects of those decisions, and how well one truly knows the people they love. 

One reviewer called it "tragicomic" and I think that's the perfect description. Barnes' writing is often witty and I found myself chucking frequently. But there is a sadness throughout that builds throughout the book. Miranda's father suffers the aftereffects of WWII and they both suffer the aftereffects of depression that followed it in England. That poverty has turned both parents into hoarders of a sort, which is both sad but also humorous in Barnes' hands. But life has hardened them as well. Which makes visiting them hard on Miranda, who writes to her sister, after one visit, that she left with "the usual desire to kill." 

I believe, in retrospect, that this book came to my attention via The New York Times Book Review and that I immediately requested it from my library just to avoid having to take the time to record it into my TBR list. I must say, it’s not a half bad way to get yourself to read something you might otherwise have put off. That would have been a terrible shame in the case of The Usual Desire To Kill. 

Life: It Goes On - April 19

Happy Sunday! It's another chilly weekend here after a week with some very warm temps. I need to have the chilly days fall during the week and the warm days on the weekend! Although that would have tempted me to head to the nursery even sooner to start getting plants. This week, though, this week I'm going! The Big Guy is already resigned to the fact that the kitchen table may be covered with plants for a week or so while I wait for us to be closer to frost free. 

Struggling this week with energy, which is a good thing for my reading but a bad thing for everything that needs to be done around the house. I did end up working on taxes every night through Wednesday, battling through my dad's until the last minute. Strange to think that I won't have to do his any more, but tax time will be so much less stressful. 

Last Week I: 

Listened To: I finished The Guncle and started Jess Walter's So Far Gone. Next up I have Allen Levi's Theo of Golden.

Watched: The Voice, plenty of Nebraska softball and baseball, an episode of The Gentlemen, and the penultimate episode of season four of Bridgerton. I had really thought that I wouldn't watch season four, but desperate for something to watch one evening, when I had the television to myself and wanted something familiar, I started it. Of course, I had to finish it, which I'll do Wednesday when BG heads off to his weekly guys' night. 

Read: I finished Andrew Sean Greer's Less is Lost and I'm about halfway through Elise Meyer's That's A Good Question, I'd Love To Tell You. 

Made: Realized Monday that our food plans for the week started with meals that started with the letter "P" so I decided to see if we could go the whole week with main courses that started with "P." Pasta, potatoes baked, potatoes fried (we always bake and entire bag of potatoes at once), pad thai, and paninis. Last night I even had a pancake (sweet potato) when we went out to eat! 

Enjoyed: Dinner with old friends last night. Well, I should say we enjoyed the time with them, although the experience left something to be desired. Ever been to a restaurant that's essentially out of beer? 

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This Week I’m:  

Planning: Continue to have some paperwork that needs to be done, then the weather will determine what I work on for decluttering. Forty Bags In Forty Days flew by without my even starting it, but I'd still like to do it on my own - just need to figure out the starting date. 

Thinking About: What I want to do with plants outside this season. I've got some new planters that will need different things and some old ones that need to be tossed, so it will be fun to shop this year. 

Feeling: Worried. My old cat has been feeling so good these past few weeks and we had become certain that the problems she'd faced had been resolved. But the past few days, she's been having trouble again and I'm sure a visit to the vet is in our near future so see if we can get her back on track. 

Looking forward to: Headed out the door in a few minutes to have lunch with friends, then next weekend is our siblings dinner (not this weekend has I had thought). 

Question of the week: Are you a gardener? If so, food plants, flowers, or both? We will plant tomatoes, as always, but are thinking about other veggies we can try this year. Will probably try some beans but not sure what else.