Meghan Markle, the wife of Prince Harry, was just given a truly humiliating piece of news when it was revealed that her new children’s book “The Bench” failed to even make the United Kingdom’s official Top 50 chart during its debut week.
Daily Mail reported that “The Bench” only sold 3,212 copies in its first week compared to the No. 1 book “The Thursday Murder Club” by Richard Osman, which sold 28,383 copies in the same time period.
Meghan has claimed that “The Bench” stemmed from a poem that she wrote for Harry on Father’s Day following the May 2019 birth of their son Archie. Publisher Penguin Random House said that the book details the “special relationship between father and son, as seen through a mother’s eyes.”
“My hope is that ‘The Bench’ resonates with every family, no matter the makeup, as much as it does with mine,” Meghan said.
Unfortunately for Meghan, however, the book has been panned by critics, with The Telegraph’s Claire Allfree describing it as “semi-literate.”
“One wonders how any publisher could have thought fit to publish this grammar-defying set of badly rhyming cod homilies, let alone think any child anywhere would want to read it,” she added. “But that’s planet Sussex for you, where even the business of raising a family is all about the brand.”
The Times‘ Alex Connell wrote that the book was a “self-help manual for needy parents.”
“The story [is] so lacking in action and jeopardy you half wonder if the writing job was delegated to a piece of furniture…” Connell continued.
Many accused Meghan of hypocrisy for writing a children’s book about fathers when she has long been estranged from her own father, Thomas Markle.
“It’s very easy to talk about relationships between fathers and sons when they are two years old,” royal biographer Penny Junor told The Sun. “But problems come when the children are older — as Meghan found out with her father and Harry with Prince Charles.”
Angela Levin, Harry’s biographer, agreed with this assessment.
“Once again we have the hypocrisy of Meghan and Harry saying one thing but not doing it themselves,” she said. “I don’t know how you can write about a boy, a son or a father, when you haven’t spoken to your own father for years. It is extraordinary.”
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