Title: Dear Presti: the Prince's Pen Pal
Author: Karrie Roman
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: 12/31/2024
Heat Level: 1 - No Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 65686
Genre: Contemporary, humor, romance, royalty, blue collar, Australia, England, pen pals
Add to Goodreads
Description
Two men. One a royal born and bred, the other…not.
Prince James lives a life of stifling duty behind the walls of Buckingham Palace. He keeps his secrets and his stiff upper lip while dreaming of the day he will be free to find the man of his dreams. It’s a day he believes might never come. Until Prestidigitation Jones, an ethnobotany student from a small town in Australia, bursts into his life.
Prestidigitation marches to his own beat along with his small group of family and friends. He long ago accepted most people found him a little eccentric, but that won’t stop him from living on his own terms. Though happy enough, Presti dreams of finding a man who accepts him as he is and loves him unconditionally.
A fated meeting throws them together. An attraction blooms, and a friendship begins. Distance keeps them apart, but destiny brings them together.
Through a trail of exposed secrets, false starts and unfathomable tragedy, James and Presti’s feelings for each other grow stronger. Does James have the courage to fight for his dream? Can Presti face the public scrutiny of being the plus one of the spare to the throne?
Surely together, they can find their way to happiness/find their happily ever after.
Excerpt
Dear Presti: the Prince’s Pen Pal
Karrie Roman © 2024
All Rights Reserved
Some people have a unique gift bestowed on them at birth. Perhaps one they enjoy bragging about or showing off at parties, performing these oddities like show ponies. The only gift I possessed seemed to be attracting unwanted attention.
Unlike many in these strange days of reality TV and phone cameras, I preferred to remain unnoticed. Anonymous. Out of the spotlight. Thank you very much. My dearest friend, Astrid, delighted in pointing out how I drew attention as if I were a magnet. She blamed the fantastical way I’d entered the world. She claimed that it was simply not possible for me to remain in the background after I’d burst onto the world stage in such a public way at my unusual birth.
I adored my best friend even if she did have an annoying tendency to be correct.
Though I attempted to move wraith-like through my days, I tended to stand out like a rainbow on a grey day. That’s how my mother described me, at any rate.
I did not like this state of affairs one little bit.
On this overcast day, the rainbow hovered just out of sight as I attempted to wade through the press of bodies on the overcrowded bus. I tried to move silently, ghost-like. Moving this way and that, shifting to avoid others so I didn’t so much as graze anybody.
“I beg your pardon. Did you say you’re studying poo, young man?” The woman screeched as I pressed against her legs. She clacked her knitting needles at a prodigious rate of knots, quite heedless of how perilously close they were to poking the large man sitting next to her.
“No, ma’am. I said I’m trying to get through.” All eyes were fixed on our interaction, except those who chose sensibly to travel on public transport using earbuds. Those people remained happily serenaded by Bruce Springsteen or some other artist. Eminently sensible, I thought.
The octogenarian knitter nodded and returned to her stitches, leaving me to smile awkwardly at those around us.
Mentioning poo is not the best place to start my story—and I swear there will be no further scatological mentions—but I must begin this tale somewhere.
Much like life, when we are thrust kicking and screaming into this world, starting at the beginning is the best way to go. So it is at my birth that we must begin.
My fantastical birth, as previously hinted at, is quite the tale. It’s also where some might argue I peaked as a person and had my promised fifteen minutes of fame, all in one ignominious day. All this greatness and celebrity happened to me the day I was born, so I don’t remember it myself, yet I feel pretty scarred by it, nonetheless. For better or worse, I also own plenty of photos and articles to look back on so I can reminisce about my extraordinary birth. It’s not everyone who can claim a naked photo of themselves on just about every worldwide newspaper front page.
You see, my mother, the sweetest and kindest woman I’ve ever known, is also somewhat odd. At least my grandfather always described her as such. I prefer to think of her as one of those people that extraordinary things happen to. I think it was from her that I received my gift.
Her strict, conservative father, Grandpa Joe, never had any flavour to his life that I ever saw—no joy. He fancied himself the keeper of everyone’s soul. He lived miserably while trying to save us all from hellfire and brimstone. To my young eyes, he seemed melancholy. He may have loved stomping about his run-down home—asylum, as I liked to think of it—swearing at the television as if the people he cursed might take the trouble to answer. He apparently never found any happiness in it though. A smile from Grandpa Joe would be like stumbling across a blooming corpse flower.
When I think back on Grandpa Joe, sadness at his misery most often strikes me. More times than I could count, I tried to tell him not to worry about what everybody else was getting up to or with whom and instead enjoy what he had around him. Nine times out of ten, he bit my head off for my trouble. The one time out of ten he spread his arms wide and asked, “Enjoy what exactly?”
Poor Grandpa Joe, whether he loved the curmudgeon life or not, it loved him. Mum liked to say that being such a cranky old fart kept Joe alive until his early eighties when he rightfully should have died much sooner. Grandpa Joe loved his daily whiskies and packs of smokes. A courageous doctor once told him that he had the heart of a ninety-year-old. Of course, Joe was only sixty-eight at the time. But that was Joe.
He wasn’t often proud of Mum and me, but he shone with pride the day I was born, or so I’ve been told.
Getting back to that day, you should know that our queen—bless her—has been on the throne for sixty years this year. But when I was born, it had only been forty glorious years. Her fortieth year of reigning coincided with Australia hosting the Olympic Games. It was a festive year for Australia. Our highest medal tally at the games and our longest reigning monarch all in the same three hundred sixty-five days. Celebrations spilled onto the streets.
That year was a big one for my mum too. First and most importantly—she always says—she got pregnant with me. Around the same time, she successfully applied to be a volunteer at the Games. It was to be her first job, not that she’d be getting paid, but just the same, Grandpa Joe proudly told everyone he met. Mum had never had a job before. Too flighty, Joe had often said. Her head always in the clouds. Mine would have been, too, if I’d had to listen to Grandpa ranting and raving daily.
Anyway, Mum volunteered at the Olympic Games and did quite a good job. People liked her good heart and kindness. Grandpa Joe seemed to be the only one who cared about her flightiness and general lack of ambition. In fact, Mum made the news a few times during the games for being Australia’s best mascot, showing the world the kind of people we were.
Mum became so well known that when the queen went on a Commonwealth tour as part of her ruby jubilee—rubilee as Mum called it—she insisted that my mum and a handful of other volunteers were present at the athletes’ meet and greet. Imagine Grandpa Joe’s face when he discovered his daughter would meet the queen. Well, we don’t know what his face was because he’d kicked Mum out for getting pregnant without a husband by then. I guess it’s self-explanatory that he took her back, but that wasn’t till after I was born.
So, the athletes’ parade happened, and we all ended up at Government House for luncheon with the queen. I say we because, of course, I was there in my mum’s belly—but there just the same. During the luncheon, each athlete and volunteer was presented to the queen with cameras rolling for the poor folk at home to gander at.
The volunteers were to be presented at the end, but Mum told me later she didn’t care; she’d have waited all day to meet Queen Anne. Mum admires the guts out of that older woman. Even to this day, she’ll stand and sing “God Save the Queen” as loud as she can whenever she hears it, no matter where or when. No matter that it hasn’t been our national anthem for decades.
I guess that explains why Mum didn’t let the little fact that she’d been having labour pains all day deter her from her chance to meet Her Majesty.
The doctors told Mum later that I must have been crowning when Mum attempted an ill-advised curtsey before the queen. Rather appropriate term, I always thought—and so too did the newspapers when they reported on the baby who’d been born at the feet of the monarch. “Couldn’t Wait to Meet His Queen,” one newspaper headline had declared. That same article described how I’d shot out of my mum and landed on the royal toes. Mum never liked that article. She hated how common they had made it sound, talking about Her Majesty attempting to catch me like a football punt.
And so, there was my fifteen minutes of fame. Photos of my newly-arrived-into-the-world, utterly naked body lying at the feet of Queen Anne splashed in the worldwide media. A few also showed pictures of the queen’s stunned expression or my mother’s contorted face as she pushed the last of me out.
Queen Anne bore the hubbub well. She’d looked down at me and then at my mother before saying, “Well, that is either the best bit of prestidigitation I’ve ever seen, or you’ve just had a baby, my dear.”
And that was how I got my name.
Prestidigitation Jones.
Image by Creative Canvas from Pixabay
Ornery Owl's Review
Rating: Four out of Five Stars
The four-star rating stems from quibbly subjective issues rather than from the quality of the writing. This slow-burn contemporary forbidden romance between a royal and a commoner has great pacing to hold the reader's interest as it moves seamlessly between the viewpoints of Prestidigitation Jones, a young working-class Australian man, and Prince James, the spare from an alternate universe British monarchy. The dialogue is clever, and the characters are engaging. If angsty slow burn with plenty of comedic turns is your thing, you will surely enjoy this story.
A scene toward the end of the book made me ugly cry. This is rare because I'm usually a stoic monster with a heart like a cash register. I'm not subtracting a star for this scene. It was well-written and made sense in the context of the book. However, some romantic comedy fans may find it out of place in an otherwise amusing story.
Thankfully, this book did not try to include every identity under the sun. When authors attempt this, it comes off as heavy-handed moralizing and disrupts the flow of the story. It did use the term queer a few times. As I've mentioned before, I dislike this particular label. It has historically been used as an anti-homosexual slur, and I see no reason to embrace it.
I would have preferred Prince James to be from a fictional small monarchy rather than a member of an alternate-universe British monarchy. The AU British monarchy take interrupted the flow of the story because I kept thinking, "Wait! Queen Elizabeth ruled Brittania for seventy-some years! Anne is a princess!"
These issues aside, I enjoyed Dear Presti and would read other books by this author.
Purchase
NineStar Press | Books2Read
Meet the Author
Karrie lives in Australia’s sunshine state with her husband and two sons, though she hates the sun with a passion. She dreams of one day living in the wettest and coldest habitable place she can find. She has been writing stories in her head for years but has finally managed to pull the words out of her head and share them with others. She spends her days trying to type her stories on the computer without disturbing her beloved cat Lu curled up on the keyboard. She probably reads far too much.Website | X
Giveaway
One lucky winner will receive a $50.00 NineStar Press Gift Code!
