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Imagine having ringside seats to the biggest sex scandal in British history since Henry VIII decided to embrace serial monogamy. That's the position enjoyed by the heroine of Laurie Graham's delightful novel, Gone with the Windsors.
Rich, young and widowed, Maybell Brumby is an American living in 1930s London, where Wallis Warfield Simpson is luring the heir to the British Empire, the Prince of Wales, to his doom. Or at least toward abdicating the throne for "the woman I love."
Happily for the reader, Mrs. Simpson is Maybell's girlhood pal, now an ambitious, clever American divorcee on her second hubby.
Graham has Maybell keep a diary of her renewed friendship with Simpson. Her journal tracks the love affair of the century, starting in 1932 and continuing through the Duke and Duchess' exile in France in 1940.
The result is screamingly funny. Maybell is dimwitted and utterly unaware that she is witnessing history. Or even adultery.
Famous people are met and misidentified, such as a talented piano player who inexplicably works as a "coal porter."
She also fails to realize what a grasping, avaricious reptile Mrs. Simpson is. And the poor Prince of Wales belongs in a psychiatric textbook under "pathological emotional neediness."
Because Maybell's sister, Violet, is married to a well-connected Scottish lord, Maybell gets to hear on an almost daily basis what the British upper class really think of that dreadful American woman.
Windsors' true charm is rooted not in Maybell's friendship with Mrs. Simpson, however, but in the bonds Maybell forms with her two sisters and a nephew and a niece. Self-absorbed and light on brains, Maybell is a corker of an aunt to good Rory and wild Flora, always ready to spoil them with treats and silly gifts.
And Maybell's diary positively teems with crazed viscounts, oily fortune hunters, offended butlers and bossy aunts.
If you like P.G.. Wodehouse -- or if British royalty is your cup of English Breakfast tea -- go with the Windsors.
*Read an excerpt at books.usatoday.com.
Gone with the Windsors
By Laurie Graham
HarperCollins, 404 pp., $24.95
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