The Royal We and Margot

I enjoyed the new Hallmark Channel film about a pair of royals who were pressed together to negotiate a marriage of convenience to bring peace to their kingdoms. She went to America to live a normal life, but her sister married a commoner, and our "spare" had to step in. They turn out to be a good match. 

Hallmark is having a few royal-based films this month. One charm here was that few Hallmark films involving royals focus on female royals. The actress years ago was in a musical medieval t.v. series. 

The actress is Australian, so she has a certain international flavor mixed in with a believable foreign accent. She also has nice hair.

I read a good book on Anne Frank's diary, and it included a reference to her sister's lost diary. I also found a reference to this fictional account of Margot Frank's survival. Good try, but it didn't work for me. 

One problem is that the book has a half-baked explanation of what happened. Margot Frank supposedly jumped off a train to the concentration camp where she died in real life. The plan was for both sisters to jump. Anne, however, did not manage. 

Okay. So, why did people think she died? Did Anne pretend someone else was her sister? Furthermore, why did Margot think her father was dead until the diary came out? She looked at reports to find the others who had died. 

It's okay to suspend belief, but if you go halfway with an explanation, which is not truly necessary given the whole exercise here, go all the way. 

However, there was no report of Otto dying. And, she even stayed for a long time with a friend of her mother's. He had no connections with Otto or his surviving family whom Otto corresponded with? 

(We simply get no sense of what happened when Margot finally told Otto years later.)

If we move past that, the story itself is not too rewarding. First, she finds someone with Peter's name (it turns out "really" she and Peter were an item; apparently, Anne made up her relationship with Peter) in Philadelphia, where she is now living. The book draws out for too long her finding out it isn't Peter.

Plus, a relationship with Peter is not necessary for the plot. Besides that, there's some drama at the law firm she works for (she hides that she is a Jew or a survivor), including a Holocaust survivor who claims discrimination. This provides some dramatic weight but not enough for over three hundred pages.

Again, it's an interesting idea, but it didn't work for me. I do wish to know more about Margot. Each Annex member has a story, including the dentist whose non-Jewish girlfriend and his son from his first marriage both survived the war. 

The book didn't do enough to help us learn about her, and a major thing was unnecessarily made up.