Mari Ann Caudill, $0.99, ISBN 978-1452308845
Fantasy Romance, 2010

Secrets of a Kingdom feels like a rather generic title for Mari Ann Caudill’s short story about a forbidden romance between a witch and the son of a king that is at war with her father.

As this is a short story, there isn’t much that I can say here. There’s no room for twists and turns, so it is exactly what it says on the box: Luca disobeys his father to canoodle with Zeena.

Sure, he and his father’s men destroyed the homes of Zeena’s people, but hey, there’s nothing some TLC can’t fix.

The resolution of the conflict, though, has me scratching my head because it is more of a confluence of things happening that happen to favor Luca and Zeena, rather than anything that they do for themselves.

Sure, I can wave that off by saying that the matters of political conflict are way too big to be resolved by two silly moppets in love, and I’d even say that the conflict is far too big for a story of this length. In a way, the author is setting herself up, if not for failure, perhaps to deliver a story that can’t help coming off as abrupt and choppy due to the accelerated pace of convenient plot developments in the whole thing.

Is it readable, though? Well, I sit through the whole thing without experiencing any ill-effects, so yes, I’d say it is. In fact, it’s a nice way to ease me back into reading after all that holiday bustle that keeps me away from it.

However, it’s not exactly the most memorable read around, due to the premise being too big for a short story.

Maybe there is a lesson here somewhere: keep those War and Peace stuff to something that can be as long as, say, War and Peace!