Her Secret Prince

by Madeline Ash

April 7, 2015 · Tule Publishing

Buy →

B-

More Info →

View Book Info Page

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Jenny. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.

Here is Jenny's review:

I have been in a major reading rut lately, and have had a hard time finding a story I could get lost in. I picked up “Her Secret Prince” because it was (a) short, and (b) combined the second-chance/reunited lovers trope with a secret royal heir, neither of which are my usual fare. This story is the second of four novellas in the Royal Holiday series. Each book is written by a different author, and can be considered a stand-alone book in that context. However, this story includes two secondary characters (Alexia and Parker) from Madeline Ash’s previous novel, The Playboy, which I have not read. While I got the gist of the relationship between Dee (the heroine) and Alexia (her best friend), I suspect that I may have had a better understanding of their dynamic had I read The Playboy first.

“Her Secret Prince” starts with the heroine & hero, Dee and Jed, as high school students. Dee has always lived in San Francisco, while Jed and his mom moved around frequently, never staying in any one place for too long. Dee is an only child, while Jed has never known who his father was. Dee and Jed hit it off in school, and their friendship progressed to the point where Dee finally worked up her courage to ask Jed to take it to the next level. While Dee and Jed are in his room, they hear Jed’s mom, Ellen, arrive home unexpectedly, followed by a man with a French accent demanding to know where Jed is. They barge into Jed’s room, seeing only Dee (Jed was elsewhere, trying to provide an escape route for Dee). Ellen sends off the man by pretending Dee is her only child, then orders Dee to go home. When Dee returns later to check on Jed, she learns that Ellen and Jed have moved, without saying goodbye.

The story then flash-forwards ten years. Dee is a latte-addicted screenwriter in Los Angeles, known for her non-conventional indie “romances”. Her movies do not have conventional happy endings, paralleling her own lack of a HEA. She has been left behind by everyone she cares about – her parents (who moved to Haiti as missionaries), Alexia (who moved to Australia to be with Parker), and most importantly, Jed. While this point is touched upon briefly in the beginning and near the end, Dee isn’t the type to wallow in it (except through her screenplays, apparently). Without warning, Jed suddenly appears in her life again, looking for answers to an email he received from someone claiming to be his father. While Dee has unresolved feelings about his abandonment, she takes him in without hesitation.

The bulk of the story revolves around Jed’s conflicting emotions following the contact with his putative father. Jed’s uncertainty about meeting his father increased ten-fold when he learned that his father was the Prince of a small European principality. After Jed waffles over accepting his father’s invitation to meet, Dee basically makes the decision for Jed by booking a trip to Paris that very day (people do that??).

I felt that Jed’s initial wrestling with his father’s identity (and what that meant for his own identity) was authentic, as was his frustration with his mother for withholding this information for so long. However, his transition from Nope-Nope-Nope to This-Place-Completes-Me happened too quickly after the tension of the initial meeting with his father to be fully believable.

Dee and Jed are definitely a case of opposites-attract. Dee is (as she frequently admits), “pushy,” the kind of person who grabs the bull by the horns and marches into any situation, while Jed is much more reserved. Jed has a sweet, endearing side – there are many little gestures that he does for Dee without really thinking about it. However, he also doesn’t use his words very well, and lets Dee believe that the only reason why he returned was for her memories of that night in high school. It took nearly the whole story for Jed to simply admit that Dee’s love was not one-sided (although his grovel at the end was kind of sweet).

Another issue I had involved the screenplay Dee was supposed to be working on. In the first third of the story, Dee is trying to write the ending of her screenplay (which she often writes before working on the rest of the story. Since I have the bad habit of reading the end of books first, I sense a kindred spirit.) She revises her ending with each new development in her relationship with Jed. As a plot device, I thought this was a cute idea – a way to see Dee processing how she felt about Jed’s sudden arrival. However, the excerpts from her screenplay suddenly stop, and by the end of the story, there is absolutely no word on how her screenplay ends. Given that Dee’s identity as a non-conventional screenwriter was established early on in the story, it would have been interesting to see if her newly-rekindled relationship altered her writing personae.

Grading this story was difficult. On the one hand, the first part dragged a bit, and I got annoyed with Jed’s reticence to open up to Dee. Once I got past the 50% mark, it was a fast read, and I enjoyed some of the interaction between Dee and Jed, especially their easy banter. However, while I appreciate that this series is a modern-day fairy tale, I think the overly-saccharine epilogue turned it into a “meh” for me.