Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Servant of the Crown

Great comfort read if you like romance-oriented fantasy. Plus a library! This fantasy world (or more specifically, this country in this fantasy world) has kind of a Victorian era vibe to it, with just a little magic.

2016 update: I'm bumping this up to 5 stars on reread. This is one of my favorite fantasy romances; I keep pulling it back open again every few months. It just hits all the right buttons for me, and for that it gets all the stars.

Review originally posted on www.fantasyliterature.com:

Servant of the Crown is a steampunk-flavored young adult romantic fantasy by Melissa McShane, published in July 2015. It's set in a well-imagined Victorian-era type of world where magic plays a lesser and socially suspect role. Alison, the young Countess of Waxwold, is summoned from her city to be a lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Consort of the kingdom for six months. This seems like a prison sentence to Alison, who enjoys her work in the budding printing industry and as a theater patroness, has no taste for court or social games, and no inclination to "sit around in an uncomfortable dress and keep the former Consort company" for half a year. But the royal summons from the queen cannot be gainsaid, so Alison grits her teeth and heads to the capital city of Aurilien, consoling herself with the thought that at least she’ll have access to the famous royal library with its vast collection of rare books.

Trouble begins when the Dowager gives her son, Prince Anthony North, a well-intentioned suggestion to dance with Alison at the first ball she attends. North is drop-dead good-looking and knows it, and during their dance makes a rather drunken indecent suggestion to Alison. He picked the wrong girl. Alison, who has a very sour taste in her mouth from prior romances where she found the men wanted her only for her title, wealth and/or looks, immediately slaps him across the face and storms off. Unfortunately for both Alison and North, this causes a minor sensation, and Queen Zara, the Prince’s older sister, orders the two of them to go on public dates once a week until the scandal dies down.

So far Servant of the Crown reads like a straight fantasy romance, although it has more well-developed and complex characters than usual. But when the main characters’ choices and natures lead to a crisis halfway through, it is followed by some surprising but logical turns in the plot that lead the reader down some unexpected pathways. These developments raise this novel above the typical romance and make it well worth recommending to readers who enjoy reading romances that are more thoughtfully written.

Early-technology "Devices" like printing presses and lights are powered by the magical battery-like "motive forces," giving the steampunk feel to this world, which fits in well with the Victorian-type social atmosphere. The vast royal library is almost a character in itself, with unexpected literary treasures hidden in neglected shelves. It becomes the linchpin in a political battle for power between the Queen and the powerful group scholars who have been running the library and other governmental agencies, with Alison and her assistants caught in the crossfire.

This is a fairly light but thoughtful fantasy novel that combines a clean romance with some compelling political intrigue and royal court maneuvering. I’ve read many self-published novels in the last few years, but Melissa McShane’s fantasies are complex, layered and well written, making her one of the very few self-published authors whose works I would unreservedly recommend to other readers.

P.S. There's also a bonus short story at the end about Queen Zara, who is a secondary but important character in the novel. It throws a major curve ball at the reader. I'll be really interested in future stories about this world!

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Initial reaction:
This was a fun read, a nice mix of light fantasy and a more-thoughtful-than-usual romance. It's hard to go wrong with a heroine who loves the theater and books, and a medieval-ish library!



It's a fun read that hit a lot of the right romance-loving buttons for me, but this book also contains a lot of political intrigue and royal court maneuvering, which I also love, along with a great saving-the-royal-library plot and some amazing-sounding books that I wish were really part of my world and in my own personal library. The romance content is pretty much clean: not squeaky clean, but I'd feel okay giving this to my 17 year old daughter. And I probably will. :)

I received a free copy of this book from the author for review. Thanks!