wolffyluna

Nya Jerami escaped from under the thumb of her controlling father to have an adventure in New York City-- and kinda failed at the adventure part. There were a lot more dating sims than actual dates, is what I'm saying. She has reluctantly returned to her homeland of ~~I Can't Believe It's Not Wakanda~~ Thesolo for the royal wedding of her best friend (the bride). Johan von Braustein is the step son of the King of ~~Not!Lichtenstein~~ Lichtienbourg, and is also travelling to the royal wedding of his best friend (the groom). To protect his family and draw the attention of the paparazzi, he plays at being a playboy, but he secretly has a sensitive side that he hides away in fear of hurting or getting hurt by others. His family has a problem: there's a royal referendum coming up, and the royal family had better have something cute and popular and distracting happen right now.

Nya wants adventure. Johan needs a distraction. Obviously, a fake engagement is totally a solution to their problems.

I really liked this book! Alyssa Cole is quickly becoming one of my favourite romance authors. The characters and their voices are strong, and some of the dialogue actually made me laugh out loud.

For example, in a scene where Johan is trying to help Nya exit an awkward situation by pretending to flirt with her and 'take her back to her room.'

"Fine, I'll have to actually talk dirty to you," [Johan] warned, then cleared his throat dramatically as she stiffened in apprehension. He imbued his voice with a husky lewdness. "Three day old lasagna pan that has not been soaked in a kitchen sink. Welcome mat at a pig farmer's house. Sweaty socks that have been worn for thirty consecutive days."

It's a really fun book, what can I say.

Unlike A Duke By Default, the ending isn't a crash landing. We actually get a couple pages to bask in a plausible HEA/HFA. Also, in A Duke By Default the whole last conflict was set up by an antagonist doing something contrived, and everyone reacting to it in a kind of dumb way. But here, while antagonist actions do affect what happens in the final conflict, the big driver is the characters acting like themselves. It's, like, properly driven by the main characters and their flaws and virtues and it's great.

And there are multiple queer characters! Including one of our leads! Johan is bi, and it warms the cockles of my little bi heart. (

There is a part of me that's actually tempted to write some fic about it, especially because one of the Johan's Big Things is Performance vs Authenticity, and there is certainly some mileage to get out of his Performance of bisexuality vs his 'true' bisexuality, however much that is a distinct thing from the perfomance. And also the fact that he brings something so relatively ~personal to his Playboy Prince Persona. It's interesting, but not much explored in the book.)

Though one of the characters being queer does, indirectly, cause the One Frustrating Scene.

One of the characters comes out publically as nonbinary, and part of the announcement is them telling people what pronouns and titles people should use for them.

And that's not actually the problem with the scene. The scene, in English, is totally fine and reasonable.

The problem is, while the book is in English, that's not what the characters are speaking. They're speaking Lichtienbourgish, which is a close relative of French and German. (To the point where, canonically, if you speak French and German, you'll probably know what people are saying in Lichtienbourgish.)

So it kind of threw me out of the scene when I went 'Wait, does this language actually have gender neutral third person pronouns? That don't translate as 'it'? Also, are the titles this character proposing actually pronounceable in this language? They're pronounceable in English, but--"

Which is a shame, because it's not a bad scene in and of itself. It's just-- the language thing is personally distracting.