Review: Royal Rescue

Royal Rescue by A. Alex Logan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I try to read a few books each year with protagonists whose experience of life is very different from mine as a middle-aged straight white man. This one has an asexual protagonist, which is an experience of life I knew very little about going in. I enjoyed it as a well-written story, and also for what it taught me.

Prince Gerald, the protagonist, is certainly neurotic, in the technical sense of experiencing a lot of negative emotion. That seems like an understandable consequence of having hardly anyone (not even your pretty decent cousin) believe you when you say you don't have any desire for a romantic or sexual relationship, and never will, and being caught up in a system where there's just no place for you.

In Prince Gerald's world, there's peace between nations, and part of the reason is that the old prince-rescues-princess-from-a-tower thing has become institutionalized. It's evolved in some ways; princesses can rescue princes, or rescue other princesses, or princes can rescue other princes, and there are also princexes (nonbinary royals), and nobody turns a hair at any of this. Gerald's parents are both women. But what the system does not allow for is someone who doesn't want to rescue, or be rescued by (and therefore marry) anyone at all; and it's abusive to the tower guardians, to boot, magical or semi-magical creatures who are coerced into their roles and harmed in various ways by the whole process.

Gerald wants to change the system, and with the help of a very supportive and open-minded desert prince; his cousin Erick, who's good with magic; and Erick's rescuee, a take-charge princess from a country where women aren't allowed to be in charge - not to mention the freed dragon who was his tower guardian - he sets out to do so.

It's hard to write a protagonist-changes-abusive-system novel. The whole thing about systems is that they're hard to change, a lot of people don't want them to change for various reasons, and it's not straightforward to find a satisfactory replacement. I did feel that the resolution in this book came a bit more easily than would be likely in real life, and that everyone was more reasonable and open to change than real people tend to be, but as I say, this theme is hard, and it was a pretty good job all told. The copy editing is excellent, especially for a book received from Netgalley in a pre-publication state, and I suspect this should be put down to the author knowing their craft and tools. There was a good depiction of disability, as well.

One thing I did notice was that the female characters right across the board were inclined to arrange other people's lives for them "for their own good" without a lot of consultation, whereas the male characters were a lot more open and accepting and much better listeners. I'm not going to speculate about what in the author's life experience might have led to these differences; I just note them. Also, there was a pronounced absence of personal servants throughout, though the whole point of the rescue system was to make the royals self-reliant, which might explain that.

Despite those couple of minor quibbles, this easily joins my best-of list for 2019. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing a copy for review.

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