The Decoy Princess, by Dawn Cook

I really didn't want to like The Decoy Princess, by Dawn Cook. After all, it follows in the same vein as too many of my own fantasy stories: young woman from a commoner's background thrust into intrigue. Now, my stories frequently involve inappropriate pairings of woman and dragon, and nothing like that happens in this book.

When I read the first three chapters, I was disappointed. We, the readers, already know the big revelation coming up: Tess is going to be told that her whole life is a lie, that she's not really the princess, that she's been used her whole childhood as a target for assassins while the real princess grew up elsewhere. There are some oddities of Tess's daily routine, such as why, if she's being trained to be a perfect princess, has her mentor instructed in her in such nasty things as knifeplay, bullwhips, and blow darts?

But that's not the point of the story. No, that revelation just happens on the same day that the proverbial chu hits the fan, and Tess must somehow rescue her kingdom of Costenopolie from a terrible fate.

In some respects, this isn't a great book. Cook has some native religion that might be Christianity (the real princess has been raised by nuns, and one of the characters shouts, "I don't care if it's the Second Coming!") but it's just window dressing. Nobody really cares that much for churchly things. She tries hard with the accents on some characters but overdoes it, telling instead of showing. Oh, and everyone has exactly one expletive, chu, which is a euphemism for "shit." (It was also a disconcerting euphemism for me, since chu is also the Japanese onomotopoeia for "two people cuddling." And yes, there's an onomotopoeia for that.)

But when Tess finds herself trapped in the castle, her escape is one of those heart-pounding, breathtaking adventure scenes that few writers really get right. And Cook got it right. Many of the later scenes are as tightly written as the first, and the whole of the story hangs together. The book has the important parts: a little magic, a little suggestion, a lot of adventure, a plucky young girl in trouble who can save the day.

Now I have to go find the sequel, Princess At Sea. Which is what drew me to the series in the first place. Yeah, there's a pretty girl on the cover, and the tagline, "Rough Seas. Royal Pain." That's a well-done cover. It didn't sell itself, it sold its predecessor.