Happy Friday All!

It’s Friday evening, the start of the weekend, which calls for a glass of wine, a bath and reading and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing up until now. I’ve had an absolutely lovely night and finished The Definitive Biography of Freddie Mercury: Bohemiam Rhapsody by Lesley-Ann Jones.

As this is the telling of a pretty famous guy, I don’t have much of a synopsis to write. However for those of you that have spent your life living under a rock, Freddie Mercury was the front man of the rock band Queen, who rose to fame in the 1980s. Their music is known the world over, just as much as their off-stage antics. This book covers their climb up the ladder, the lows that followed and the sometimes tragic life of Freddie.

So to begin with, I read this book because I watched Bohemian Rhapsody at the cinema last weekend. I walked out of the cinema and instantly wanted to know more about Freddie’s life. So I jumped onto Amazon and had the book in my hands the following day. Lesley-Ann Jones is a journalist and writer who toured widely with Queen and you can feel how close she became to Freddie and the rest of the band through her writing in this book. She shares conversations that she had with Freddie as well as old and recent conversations she’s had with those close to him.

I gobbled this book up because I was so interested in Freddie. Interested in his life, his successes, his highs and also his demons and his lows. I learnt a lot about Queen and their wild wild ways back in the 1980s and there were times when the book really transported me back there. One thing I must say though is that the timeline in the book is really frustrating. It isn’t written in a sensical, chronological order and often jumps around whole decades, making it very confusing. It’s almost as though it tells you things that happen in years to come to try and make you understand what’s being talked about at that moment. I really wish the timeline had been managed better.

That said, the book made me fall in love with Freddie in so many ways. I, like many many other people have been raised listening to Queen and I don’t think there are many people out there that could sing a single lyric for any one of their songs. Freddie lived such a fulfilled life and it’s made me sad to know that for an awful lot of it, he was struggling. The price people pay for success! I wish I could rate this book higher, but due to the timeline throughout the whole book, I can’t give it what it should have deserved.

😍😍😍😩😩