My mom started reading this book by Alyssa Cole about five years ago and raved about it. She didn’t have a chance to finish it before she died, so I grabbed it from her collection before my dad could start throwing stuff out. I needed a pick-me-up last month, and what better way to accomplish that than with a romance novel?
This book was everything I needed it to be. Although something I’ve learned about romance novels is that they can also pack an emotional punch in between all the playful banter and the sexy stuff. While I enjoyed the banter and the sexy stuff, I also had a hard time with some of the more serious emotional stuff because it hit a little too close to home for me.
Unlike the main character, Naledi, I always had a stable family, but in school, friends came and went so fast that I learned not to expect anyone to stick around, and that’s something I continue to struggle with to this day.
Naledi “Ledi” was orphaned at a very young age, so she grew up going from foster home to foster home. As a result, she also learned early on that no one ever chooses her. Like me, Ledi is very self-sufficient and always has one foot out the door in every relationship in her life.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even told you about the spam emails Ledi keeps getting. Someone claiming to be an assistant to a prince in some African country called Thesolo says she thinks Ledi is the prince’s long-lost fiancée. In order to confirm, they just need all Ledi’s personal identification info: date of birth, social security number, you know, the usual. Of course Ledi deletes all these spam emails without responding, but here’s the thing … they’re not spam!
The woman sending the emails, Likotsi, really is an assistant to a real life African prince, Thabiso, who really was betrothed to Ledi when they were toddlers. For some reason, Ledi’s parents packed everything up and moved to America shortly after the betrothal ceremony. They didn’t warn anyone in Thesolo that they were leaving, and they died in a car crash in America before they could get a chance to tell Ledi who she is or why they left.
So Ledi learned to navigate the foster system and beat the odds against her to get into college and then graduate school. She’s working multiple jobs to try to pay for everything and is barely holding it all together, and she’s exhausted all the time. So she can be forgiven for making an honest mistake while working her waitressing gig. When a gorgeous, bearded, dark-skinned man walks into the kitchen, rather than noting that he’s too well dressed to be a server, she assumes he’s Jamal, who was hired to replace the privileged white dude who just walked out on the job, leaving her to do everything herself. She starts ordering him around, and he’s too caught off guard to correct her, and hilarity ensues.
Prince Thabiso/Jamal has his own problems, not least of which is the emotional damage left by the fact that his fiancée fled the continent and left him without a bride for two decades. It was humiliating and hurtful, and while he has dated other women, his parents are now demanding he get serious about finding himself a bride.
So when Likotsi says she may have found Naledi, he decides to confront her about the fact that she and her family abandoned him and his family — not to mention their whole country. I’m still not sure how he expects her to apologize for something her parents did when she was a toddler. I guess it’s one of those cultures where the sins of the parents are expected to be visited on the children.
So Thabiso gets to know Ledi while parading as Jamal and Ledi gets to know Jamal. The deception doesn’t last long, but their mutual attraction is instantaneous, and despite the emotional walls Ledi has built around herself, Jamal seems to be able to move through those walls like no one else ever has.
While the book does acknowledge how problematic it is for Thabiso to deceive Ledi like this, and that is something he has to reckon with, I’m not sure the book takes it seriously enough. When Ledi thinks she’s having sex with Jamal and she’s really having sex with Prince Thabiso, there are some people who call that rape, and that’s a lot harder to confront and move past than your typical relationship lies.
That aside, I loved pretty much everything else about this book. I loved that, in addition to letting Jamal/Prince Thabiso through her defenses, Ledi also lets her best friend, Portia, through her defenses. It’s just one of a few examples in this book of female friendships being just as important (if not more important) than romantic relationships, and I always love when that’s included.
Also, Ledi is in grad school to become an epidemiologist, and I did not realize until I got to the end of the book and skimmed her bio that Cole has also worked as a science writer!
I’ll definitely be picking up the sequel to this book. Fingers crossed that it won’t be as problematic as this one.