Nobody’s Princess, Erica Ridley
Nobody’s Princess gives Graham Wynchester a chance to really shine — something I’d been looking forward to for quite a while after his appearances in The Duke Heist and The Perks of Loving a Wallflower. Here he’s centre stage, romantic hero, and he finally has a chance to rescue a real princess (sort of).
Kunigunde is a visitor from the very kingdom the Wynchesters’ adoptive father Bean came from, and she’s on a mission to become a Royal Guardswoman, the very first. Her brothers have different ideas, and are trying pretty hard to chase her down, but Graham’s at hand to involve himself (whether she likes it or not) and save the day (whether or not she’d have come up with something for herself).
It was nice to see Graham front and centre, and maybe it’d just been a little while since I read the other books, but I was surprised by how silly he was at times. Not that I really should have been, given the Wynchesters’ banter amongst themselves — but I did have a touch of embarrassment squick about his quixotic attempts to be Kuni’s knight in shining armour.
I did love the way Kuni found herself falling in love with not just Graham, but the whole life of the Wynchester family. I wasn’t sure about how things were going to get figured out, but I found the end pretty satisfactory.
I didn’t love this as much as the first two books, and I had a bit of concern about the way Kuni was portrayed (in particular, the kind of language mistakes she made, which didn’t at all seem to fit with her proficiency with the language or my experience of people who speak English as a second language — I’m married to one, so you could say I’ve done extensive research on the subject). That said, I absolutely inhaled the book, and I had a lot of fun.
