I have an enduring fondness for the mind candy that is category romance, and even now that the Mills & Boon (aka Harlequin) editors, in their infinite wisdom, have now decided to title their output with long-winded and perhaps overly descriptive monikers — this month saw the release of The Greek’s Billion-Dollar Baby, The Innocent’s Emergency Wedding and The Virgin Princess’s Marriage Debt, for example — I will pick one up once in a while, and then while away an hour or so in a fugue-like state as I absorb the complete nothingness that is often sweet but is also essentially insubstantial.
Basically, these books are the literary equivalent of cotton candy. Except, they kind of leave a bad taste in the mouth. So, they’re like cotton candy made with artificial sweetener.
Wait, is there diet cotton candy?
Anyway, this is… another one of those. There is an Australian lighthouse, a heavily pregnant heroine, the titular Crown Prince from a fictional European nation, and much angst that could be solved with a timely conversation that no one will have until the final chapter, because otherwise there would be no story. It was all very silly and improbable and nonsense, but it was exactly the holiday my overburdened brain was desperate for today, and so I forgive this book all its flaws because sometimes you just need cotton candy.
Even if it is diet.
SCORECARD
TBR DAY 303: New Year Wedding for the Crown Prince by Meredith Webber
GENRE: Medical Romance, Category Romance, Contemporary Romance
PUBLISHED: 2019
TIME ON THE TBR: ~6 months.
PURCHASED FROM: K-Mart.
KEEP: Nope.
Don’t get me wrong here. I am very happy for Frances Mayes that she spent the duration of her Money Pit-like renovation of her new holiday home in Italy’s gorgeous Tuscany region with her long-time husband, Ed. It is lovely that they experienced the vicissitudes of their enormous undertaking — from understanding cultural differences to dealing with ancient plumbing — together, and had each other to lean on when all the foreignness of their surroundings just got a little too unbearably foreign for these American part-time expats.
You know how some writers just have their thing? Anne Bishop’s thing is Super Special Women being oppressed by Evil Men, and beloved of two competing saviours, one stalwart and kind, the other arrogant and often mean.
This soul-searing novel was turned into a much-feted film starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson in the early 90s, which I remember watching in the cinema upon its release. I was already very fond of stories mired in the past when in my teen years, and I remember convincing my friend Serena that we should totally see this instead of Wayne’s World 2. 
Another Eva Ibbotson triumph, though this one is rather more outlandish than the others I have read thus far. Because there are ghosts in this one, and everyone is cool with there being ghosts, and moreover — spoiler alert for a thirty-year-old kids’ book — at the end, the ghosts become celebrities.
Surreal is the only word that can be applied to this mind-twisty, somewhat headache-inducing novel, which I bought long, long ago upon the recommendation of the Amazon algorithm that has, to date, found me most amenable to most of its suggestions of books I might like.
In this somewhat strident effort, celebrated athiest Christopher Hitchens argues — very persuasively, very successfully — that humanity has outgrown religion in these science-blessed times, and in fact that religion is far more harmful than it is helpful nowadays.
A third day in a row spent with the extraordinary ladies of the Athena Club was very well spent, as Mary Jekyll and her unlikely associates battle once again against the dastardly doings of the world-spanning alchemist conspiracy, while also trying to discover the whereabouts of Sherlock Holmes — in whom our Mary is increasingly interested, despite herself — missing these several days.
The next adventure of the newly-formed Athena Club, a group of literature-adjacent young women variously experimented on or deeply affected by said experiments, sees them travel to Europe to rescue the kidnapped Lucy Van Helsing.
With the third book in this series just released, I at last decided to read the trilogy, the first two of which I bought on a whim because the title of this one just would not be denied.