She Was A Queen

She was indeed a Queen. Born a peasant in thirteenth-century Burma, Queen Saw--young, beautiful, and extremely intelligent--reigned beside two kings. Everything luxuriantly cruel or voluptuously lovely swirled around the royal White Umbrella: mandarins, oracle-eating tigers, murdersome intrigue, egg-sized emeralds, concubines, fearsome magic, Tartars, and groveling courtiers (with elbows calloused as thickly as the soles of their feet). Queen Saw happily survived all--her two husbands as well as the Mongol invasion. Wonderful in its details and historical lore, the chief enchantment ofShe Was a Queenis the storytelling style of Maurice Collis. A book by him, Eudora Welty noted, "is as strategically put together and as fantastically simple as a fairy tale; and it affects us, quite aside from the scholarship of Mr. Collis, with that true belief we gave fairy tales when children."