When I was young, it occurred to me several times that I was really a princess, and that some unfortunate accident had dropped me in the wilds of Minnesota, on a farm. This thought would occur to me most forcefully when it was my turn to get up at 6 am and tramp out to the barn to feed the chickens and all the rest of the animals out there. (My father was a poet who didn’t farm the land, but we collected a motley assortment of horses, two sheep, exotic chickens, farm cats, etc.)
I know I’m not alone in this delusion, in fact, in the years since I’ve decided that it’s the curse of the first-born daughter. We all think (secretly) that we were born for better things, things like ermine and power and someone who lives to do our ironing.
The result is that I absolutely adore stories about princesses. And when Christina Dodd announced that she was doing a series about princesses, I was on board immediately. But the princess I was most interested in hearing about was the princess I would be, the first born.
Christina’s The Prince Kidnaps a Bride is an absolutely wonderful princess story, bawdy, sexy, funny and with a deep ringing note of emotion. Sorcha is a great princess. She’s innocent but not the stupid kind of innocence that doesn’t recognize a good thing when it comes her way- like, say, a really stupid, ragged, one-eyed but goodlooking fisherman who ends up accompanying her through England til they end up at a picnic in a fairy ring and, and… All I can say is that I momentarily ceased to be a reader and became a jealous author. I wish I’d written that scene!
And the ones that followed too. Those would be when Sorcha (who’s learned a lot from an enlightening rest stop at a bawdyhouse), asks her traveling companion (the prince, natch), if his cock is unnaturally large. When he chokes over her use of words, she declares that once she’s a queen she’ll make a law: Princesses may call a cock a cock and no one shall stop them. Great!
But I really fell in love with Sorcha when the prince started fibbing to her.
| “If all the men in Europe,” he says, “put their cocks on a table, mine would be the biggest.”
“Really?” Dear heavens. She believed him. “No.”“Maybe not,” says Sorcha, “but I’d sure like to see the cast of performers. |
Yes! Go Sorcha! I don’t want you to think that this book is all bawdy jokes and sexy interludes in the afternoon air, it isn’t. Deep and realistic love develops between Sorcha and Rainger. The end is thrilling and dangerous, and made me sigh. There’s even a touch of paranormal here and there that points ahead to Christina’s next book, a paranormal!
