Lady Pamela: My Mother's Extraordinary Years as Daughter to the Viceroy of India, Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen, and Wife of David Hicks

As a former World history teacher, I am fascinated with British history. I’ve visited the UK many times and read countless works on the Royal family and the history of the British Empire.I have also purchased all of the previous renderings of India Hicks, and I find this memoir about her mother simply outstanding.The photos inside are incredibly well displayed and they tell a story of an important and interesting life. Lady Pamela certainly was, not only a first hand witness to history, but a history maker herself.I am extremely pleased with this book- its content, photos, and organization. It is simply beautifully done!Thank you, India, for sharing such an intimate portrait of your mother. What a wonderful tribute to her while she is still with you. Well done!

Beautifully written history by a loving daughter of a remarkable, quiet woman who by virtue of birth led an extraordinary life. Interesting to see the generations of women in this family and how they have been shaped by each other.

I am a great admirer of Lady Pamela and am always happy to learn more about her, but this book is awkward to hold (large and heavy!), and not as accurate or helpful as it could be. Too frequently, daughter India Hicks makes errors about her family that she or her editors should have caught. For example, she states that by 1948 Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip had two children, Prince Charles and Princess Anne, when on the next page she states (correctly) that Princess Anne was born in 1950! A caption for one photo states that Queen Elizabeth is holding the hand of a young Prince Charles when the child in question is clearly Princess Anne, sporting her blonde curls and wearing a girl's coat! Hicks had so many photos and bits of memorabilia to sift through that she organizes them by epochs, scattering them on a succession of her mother's silk scarves to make one full-page collage photo per chapter. As a result, the individual items on each scarf look tiny—readers can't make out who/what is pictured in these uncaptioned scattershot bits. Even when Hicks features a single photo in a full-page format, the caption appears on a different page, so readers are never entirely sure what they're looking at. Clearly it was a labor of love for Hicks to sort through her mother's memorabilia and assemble this tribute to her mother and her family, but the book would have benefitted from better design and more careful editing.