The Royal Daughter

Strong Dual Timeline Emotional Rollercoaster. This is a book about finding yourself and doing your own thing - even when everything and everyone is against you. It is about finding family you never knew you had. It is about unravelling decades old family secrets... that you didn't even know were secrets. It is about falling in love, a few times over - at least once in each timeline, + falling in love with a new land.

As Lane has done throughout this series, she yet again shows remarkable skill in bringing together the two halves of her former writing - the romance + the historical fiction - in a genuinely compelling, but only very loosely coupled, series. Indeed, while other *groups* of authors have, over the last several years in particular, come together with similar loosely coupled "series" where each can be read as standalone, all tied together by some theme or some macguffin... with this series, Lane manages to create a much more cohesive single author version of the gimmick that still maintains the "can be read as standalone" allure of this gimmick. In doing so, in many ways she changes it from a marketing gimmick to her own (so far unique, at least in my own reading) almost genre, really. Because this tale, and this series, isn't *just* romance, though it fills every (mostly "clean" / "sweet" / "behind closed doors") requirement for the romance genre that I'm aware of, even by its more strict interpretations. This book isn't *just* historical fiction, though again, it fills every requirement I'm aware of for the genre (which are much looser generally than romance). And while Lane truly excels in both spaces - and I think I've said this next bit before in other reviews of this series - she truly comes to her full ultimate power in combining them so effectively and beautifully.

And speaking of effective and beautiful... be forewarned here: there are sections near the end where the room gets extremely dusty all of a sudden. To the point that some readers may cry out for an Audible version of the tale, as it may genuinely become impossible to read the words on the page with your eyeballs due to the amount of dust in the room. (To be clear... men don't cry. But sometimes, sometimes rooms get extremely dusty - and it may *look* like we're crying or even bawling as we try to keep the dust out of our eyes. ;) )

Very much recommended.