Alice Gaines, $2.99, ISBN 978-1-940854-05-2
Contemporary Romance, 2015

The Glass Slipper is part of Alice Gaines’s Princes of Dummylover—wait a minute, let me check again—Danislova, and the prince in question here, Kurt VonRamsberg, is one of the sons of the couple featured in Royal Affair. It looks like I’m reading things in somewhat chronological order even when I am just pulling titles out randomly.

Okay, the synopsis of this story can get quite ridiculous, so bear with me.

Third time isn’t the charm for Kurt VonRamsberg, but the third woman he’s attempted to woo over to be his wife had recently given him his walking papers. He is walking around, brooding, when our heroine Casey Vaughan mistakes him for the cover model she has been waiting for, and drags him in to pose for the cover of a detective novel. The woman meant to be on the cover walks out, so Casey decides to take her place, they stand so close that she can feel his big babadook pressing into her, and she is like, ooh, she’s melting, she’s melting… wait, what kind of detective novel is this again? Are we sure it’s not the kind that has the hero probing the heroine’s downtown garage for revelations?

So, in the name of Agatha Christie, the posing leads to kissing, and now Kurt is smitten.

So, instead of telling her that he is the prince of a fictitious kingdom, he woos her while telling her that he is the descendant of a German cheese maker. Don’t ask.

Then the detective novel with him on the cover gets released despite his best efforts to stop that from happening, and Casey discovers that the guy is actually very rich, powerful, in possession of many beautiful things, and of course hot and sexy and capable of giving her multiple orgasms with just a flick of his finger… wait, what’s the problem again?

This one is meant to be a romantic comedy with explicit naughty scenes, but I’m inclined to describe this one as “Just how much can you suspend your disbelief?” Really, for this story to work, a reader has to be able to complete dissociate this contemporary romance from any semblance to contemporary real life. Plot developments can be absurd, although I’m supposed to be okay with all this because this story is a comedy, and there is hardly any believable tension or conflict here.

For instance, getting hitched to a prince, that is apparently under the close scrutiny of his own family as well as his kingdom, isn’t going to be very fun, especially for a heroine that is caught unaware of all this. There will be many new rules to learn and follow, new routines to get used to, et cetera, but what passes for conflict here is Casey catching Kurt holding the hand of another woman. Becoming a princess doesn’t need any major changes or sacrifices on Casey’s part, it seems, and this very childish view of this particular reality makes this story more appropriate as a silly princess fantasy for prepubescent girls. Of course, the mother of these girls may not be thrilled with her daughters reading about what Kurt is doing to Casey with his fingers like that, but hey, reading is educational.

Ultimately, The Glass Slipper seems to be suffering from an identity crisis. It wants to serve up hot sex between a prince and some American lady, but while these scenes are meant for discerning adults, the fantasy that these scenes are wrapped in will be more believable to sheltered young girls that still want to be a Disney princess. I’m all for authors sneakily inserting naughty scenes into stories that resemble teenage fantasies—hormonal teenage readers deserve hot stuff to read too, if you ask me—but this one, I don’t know. It’s written and packaged in a manner that screams “for aging romance readers”, so I doubt the teens of today will bother to take time out from their social media overload to even glance at it.