This is based on The Princess Bride, except with an Adventure Girl princess. Princess Amarande is sixteen when her father dies unexpectedly--presumably from someone else poisoning her. Because her father never changed the laws to let her inherit in full without being married, Amarande is immediately getting harassed by all and sundry to marry one of the other nearby rules--one of whom is an ancestor of hers and already married, even, ew/? and the best option is a jerky venal prince around her own age with a younger scheming brother who's even worse and a dowager queen who doesn't want to give up the throne.
But everyone already knows that Ama's heart is with Luca the stableboy, from a neighboring kingdom where the rulers were killed and taken over by a warlord that her dad never actually did anything about for....some reason. Anyway, it's so Everybody Can See It that one of the royals--pretty obvious which one--puts some "land pirate" teenagers up to kidnapping Luca to force the princess into marrying their guy. But Ama's NOT gonna do what they say, and immediately rides off to rescue him. The good news is that Amarande is well trained in fighting, battle, swords, etc. The bad news is that (a) she hasn't really fought against anyone trying to kill her before and (b) you know what they say about no plan surviving contact with the enemy.... so things go somewhat awry, somewhat akin to the movie plot.
Ama lives in a predictably sexist world that she wants to thwart, and does her best to do that, under the circumstances of being on the run and whatnot for most of the book.
On the weak side:
- I don't feel like Amarande and Luca's true love got a whole lot of time to develop. It's an established quiet thing they haven't openly spoken of before--fine. But they have one moment of romance between them and otherwise...not so much? Both of them are nice and all--Ama being fierce primarily and Luca being the nice kind sweet guy--but I don't think anyone gets a whole lot of character sketching out, really, except here and there.
- Not exactly a book with humor in it, so if you expected it to be more like Princess Bride, it's only more in plot than say, expecting comments about a six fingered man. The three kidnapper analogies don't super stand out except for the female one. I do give the younger evil brother, points for giving the creepy chills--you can really tell who he's supposed to be channeling in one scene. Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.
- "Why the heck didn't my father change the law to be less sexist since he knew I was his only heir?" is a good point....and then we find out a nice reason that maybe he didn't....and then we find out a less nice reason as to why he might not have either. I'll take that below the spoiler cut, sigh.
On the plus side:
- I do enjoy Amarande being tough, though the scenes where she's forced to cave in to evil for a while are downer-ish.
- Luca is a nice beta male and I do like those.
- There's a lot of brewing plots going on in this story that don't come to fruition yet that are intriguing. The lost kingdom that Luca is from that he doesn't remember fleeing from as a baby, for instance. Ama reasonably suspects that ah, she knows who the Warlord is, but never gets to follow up on that. I was impressed that the book--or at least Ama--came to the same suspicion as I did there.
- There are several last minute shocking plot twist reveals that I would look forward to reading more about...I am wondering why they got dropped at the last minute, though? Again, below the spoiler cut.
Overall, I give it three and a half stars. I wasn't captivated, but I liked it well enough and it has potential.
On to the spoiler space....