collecting my royal valium

So, I was going to start this post off with your usual week-after-Thanksgiving round-up of food, shopping, and my status in various writing challenges**, but then my twitter feed exploded in a shower of sparkles about the Royal Engagement and I decided to join them. (My usual skim of reputable news outlets and the utterly grim headlines contained therein may or may not have contributed to this decision.)

As many of you know, I do love me a good Royal&Not romance, so in the spirit of the day (and to keep me from pulling out any more of my hair over the rest of reality), here are a few of my favorites (and one that annoyed me to the point of going off on a GR rant, just as a warning):

A Queen From The North, Erin McRea & Racheline Maltese == Technically, Our Heroine is not a commoner, but the British alt-history backstory gives enough of a hurdle for Our Couple to overcome w/o the extra class distance. Bonus points for making a contemporary marriage-of-convenience plot point work. (Extra bonus points for a diverse supporting cast.)

Royally Screwed, Emma Chase == American working-class girl, playboy Prince of (Not-Quite-Wales). He butted right up against too-oblivious/arrogant-to-live, but hey, he made her happy and he came through in the end, so I’m good. (There are a couple of sequels that I haven’t gotten around to yet, but I liked this one enough that I’d be willing to give them a go.)

The Royal We, Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan (aka, the gofug girls) == If you haven’t already, today would be the day to read this particular story of the Prince of Wales and his [American] college sweetheart (and her party-loving sister & his semi-feckless but secretly tragic brother.) Happily enough, it’s a kindle deal-of-the-day today. Somebody’s marketing team just won the RL Events jackpot.

To Marry a Prince, Sophie Page == This one is sweet and a little mellow, with an alternate history and line of succession that changes reality just enough to make it not!Wills&Kate-ish.

A Royal Pain, Megan Mulry == This is the one that aggravated me to no end. I should have stopped reading it 20 pages in, but I think it was the only book handy and by the time I was really annoyed, I finished it out of spite. It’s the first of a series, though, so clearly I was in the minority. YMMV.

I am waiting semi-patiently for Alyssa Cole’s A Princess In Theory, which comes out at the end of February, in which a nice, smart American girl keeps deleting all those emails about how she’s secretly betrothed to an African prince… Today seems like an excellent day to pre-order.

Plz, feel free to drop in any titles you might like to recommend.

**Answers to the mundane updates: I will have to type up the cauliflower-cheese casserole I made b/c it isn’t online, but omg, it is *so* freaking good; scored a new Lucky purse for me, socks for the boys; got some kind of a plague so my not-great-but-still-cranking-out-words writing more-or-less collapsed, 😦