I love this book, as I am obsessed with Anne herself, and have owned a copy of it since 1985. However, this book is in too many places a word-for-word repeat of John Carlova's book, Mistress of the Seas, which is Jekel's "principal source of research," and which I recently read a year ago. That's why Sea Star rates a "9" rather than a "10" in my book. This does not make it a bad book--- on the contrary! Jekel changes a number of "facts" from Carlova's book to make the story her own, but it is a wonderfully possible view of Anne's life as Anne herself might have liked it to be.