Put simply: It's not as mean as you've heard. One of the only revelations that could potentially cause any trouble in the general election is the bit about the lavish White House Halloween party designed by Tim Burton with with Johnny Depp, dressed as the Mad Hatter from Burton's awful Alice in Wonderland movie, "presid[ing] over the scene in full costume, standing up on the table to welcome everyone in character." Kantor doesn't even explain how the Obama team managed to keep a Hollywood-fueled gala from the slavering jaws of Fox News in 2009, which seems to be the real story, here. (The other seriously scandalous factoid from the book, a feud between Michelle Obama and Robert Gibbs, is too inside-baseball to capture the general public's interest.) Other than that, the marriage seems far more functional than the average American married couple. You get the sense that Kantor's search for scandal failed, but a book deadline still loomed on the horizon, so she had to publish her notes, as is.

So as scandal-bait, The Obamas is a failure. How does it read? Not very well, unfortunately. The conceit of the book, a biography of a marriage, is a good one, but Kantor abandons it midway through for what becomes a generic timeline of events in the Obama White House. And even then, the chronology is plagued by weird choices—the death of Osama bin Laden, for example, is saved until the end of the book because it happens during a sequence that Kantor chooses to represent as a bad time in Obama's presidency. This disjointedness makes the book feel like a mess, a poorly structured argument for nothing in particular. One day a great biography of Michelle Obama will be written, and The Obamas will serve as a reference for that book. But it really adds nothing to the current political conversation, and it's not going to change any minds about the First Couple.