Morton’s hastily written bio reads like fan fiction: Markle is the relatable heroine, a lovely young woman with a social conscience and the intelligence and determination to overcome a fractured family to get what she wants ... Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of dish — or palace intrigue — in Morton’s When-Harry-Met-Meghan account. Prince Charles is pretty much absent from the book, so we have no idea what dad thinks of his future daughter-in-law ... In the end, much of what’s in Morton’s book is no doubt already familiar to faithful readers of People and Us Weekly, which have chronicled every picayune detail of the royal romance, but Meghan: A Hollywood Princess still managed to make me care — OK, almost care — about Markle, which is a modest achievement.
What makes Megan: A Hollywood Princess stand out from the pack is the fame of Morton, whose book Diana: Her True Story explosively blew the cover off the unhappy marriage of Harry’s parents ... Morton provides a dutiful and generally positive profile of Markle in his biography. But there’s little of the 'wow' factor that made Diana: Her True Story such a powerful book. I wish there was more of that in Meghan: A Hollywood Princess. Yes, Morton writes about Markle growing up with a white father and an African-American mother who divorced when she was a child. He writes about the challenges and racism Markle faced being biracial in a painfully divided America. But I still wish he could have gone deeper into what motivates and inspires her.
If there are people in Markle’s early life who recall her as unimpressive or even just normal, Morton didn’t encounter them. Instead she is described as 'special,' 'extraordinary' and a 'standout' ... Obviously included to bring dramatic tension to an otherwise scandal-free portrait, these wicked whispers don’t amount to much, and ultimately say more about the way we view ambitious women than they do about Markle herself.
