The impossible just happened.
I read a series that restored my faith in romance novels.
Yes, I know. I'm as shocked as you. I honestly never thought this would happen. I gave up years ago, burned out on poorly written supernatural romance or Mills and Boon that sacrificed characterization for sex and plot (always in that order) and thinly veiled rape scenes (yeah, you wish I was joking). I'll read it for the porn, obviously, but I gave up pretending there was anything like higher art to it.
Then I cracked open the Captive Prince... okay, so I pressed the button to turn my kindle on... and rediscovered hope.
The Captive Prince was sexy, it was imaginative, it didn't do the literary equivalent of throwing characterization out of a moving car. In fact it cradled characterization to its manly bosom and made sweet tender love to it.
Yes, I went there. I wrote that sentence. Because it happened.
The premise is your standard sexy slavery premise. (Been there, done that, hidden the books where no casual peruser of my bookshelf can ever find them.) The prince Damon is betrayed by his bastard half-brother and sold as a pleasure slave to a neighbouring enemy kingdom. Trapped in this decadent foreign culture, he has to survive a power struggle with his new owner, prince Laurent, and escape home to re-take his throne. You can already see the sexy questionably-consensual shenanigans coming, no pun intended.
But this book focuses on what romance novels usually ignore. The characters. Specifically, their motivations, their loyalties, their place in the world. These things aren't warped to shape the plot, they're what drives the plot. They're the reason the two leads despise one another, and the reason they eventually come to a grudging respect (pun intended). Despite there being very little sex, at least between the two leads, the delicious slow-winding tension proves what I've suspected all these years - good characterization can be sexy.The world-building is no slouch either. In case you haven't figured it out, this is male-male romance and the author's taken an unusual tactic in normalizing it. Apparently in Laurent's culture there's a superstitious dread attached to bastards, so in order to safely engage in premarital sex, the upper classes openly keep same-sex 'pets'. Interestingly Damon's culture has no stigma against either kind of sex, and he accuses Laurent's people of 'making things needlessly complicated for themselves'. In a way it's representative of the two cultures and two men; Laurent is all elaborate schemes and hidden agendas while Damon is bluntly straightforward and blind to nuance. It's one of the reasons they consistently misunderstand one another and also turn out to be very good for each other.
Readers should be aware that this is the first book of a trilogy. The first two have been released, but the third won't be out until February. Both are a decent length with self-contained stories and incredibly addictive. I hopped straight from the Captive Prince to Prince's Gambit, even though I had work the next day. On a more serious note, some readers may find certain subject matter disturbing. Sexual assault is threatened and depicted, and child abuse is discussed. I respect the author for actually addressing these issues instead of pretending slavery is all sunshine and rainbows, but some readers may want to steer clear.
If that doesn't bother you, I highly recommend these books. They're not going to win the next Miles Franklin Award but they perform spectacularly well inside their niche and aren't afraid to take chances. Brisbane fans also note that the author is going to be at Supanova this month so it's a great chance to get your stuff signed and thank her for her part in guiding the romance genre out of the dark place Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey took it to in recent years.
It was a novel experience, reading romance without the shame or regret or bitter self-loathing, but I think I like it.
"A golden prince was easy to love if you did not have to watch him picking wings off flies."
