Bantam, $5.99, ISBN 0-553-58164-3
Historical Romance, 2001

Let’s see. A hero named Dragon. A heroine who is 17, going on 18, who runs around wearing a boy’s suit and ta-da! She’s a boy! Her name is Rycca. She and Dragon go on some nice long road trip, he to have some R&R before he goes into some arranged marriage to some chit, she to escape an unwanted marriage to an – eeuw, Viking that her abusive, evil, merciless foster family has forced her into. She has never seen this Viking, by the way, so it’s a Stupid Miss Thang Running Away rubbish thing. Guess who’s her intended.

That’s right – Dragon. But she doesn’t know it. She starts to worship the ground Dragon walks upon, because he’s so cute, so powerful, so Fabio-lously muscular, and ooh, ooh, ooh. She must have one night where she will gift him the most precious gift in Romance Novel Land – jailbait hymen. What a lucky guy Dragon is! Then she flees back to marry that husband she has never seen but is sure that he is an evil brute alright.

Then she finds out that he’s her husband, and because this story needs some another 200 pages, she immediately turns into a “No, no, no!” woman. What happens to that Mary Magdalene? We have the usual Miss Thang tantrums, the heroic Sugar Daddy rescues Girly from Evil Daddy thing, and it’s a happy ending y’all.

You like this sort of story? You’re in luck.

Okay, okay, to be fair – the storytelling is fine in that it’s not exactly written in a linear boy-meets-girl thing. It’s pretty interesting that way. But yikes, head-hopping occurs every few paragraphs to a point that it is like being stuck in a car where the inept driver changes gear every five seconds. Oh, my head. Give me paracetamol, somebody!