According to Queeney by Beryl Bainbridge

I picked up According to Queeney for $5.00 as a remaindered book for the prospect of an historically plausible glimpse of Dr. Johnson, an eccentric whose dictionary made him an icon of his era and beyond. I bogged down a bit in the middle and wasn't sure I would review it here as a book that touched me in a special way, but I found myself thinking about the characters and wondering how I would feel about the opening that frames the story after I had finished the book and re-read the beginning which is actually the end. It has the power to make the reader share the lives of the historical characters within its covers in an intimate way that left me with two lasting impressions of note: how human legends really are, and how sad it is that genius of Johnson's kind would be lost in the modern world. Telling the story "according to Queeny" placed the point of view solidly on the sidelines, in the hands of someone unimportant to historians but as much a person with her own goals as anyone who makes it into Who's Who, for whom the great man was both a very real person who was a long-term friend of the family, as worthy of both criticism and compassion as her mother or other family friends, and a bit of a bother to a young girl with little person interest in him. Perhaps I, like Dr. Johnson, was suffering a bit of a depression when I put the book aside, temporarily. I am glad I completed the journey.