THE FORCE OF SUCH BEAUTY

The life of a princess is even worse than it looks.

“All fairy tales serve the same purpose. One woman’s story, told to warn the others. Here is how I lost my feet; here is how I lost my voice; here is how I lost my children....Fairy tales are not about sparkling shoes or white cats. They are about the ribbons that adorn, then sever, your neck.” After dark, edgy takes on the worlds of fashion and art, Bourland takes on world-class running and royal living. Her heroine, a young South African athlete named Caroline Muller, is the fastest woman in the world, having set a record for the marathon at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Eighteen months later she has a career-ending fall that results in massive anatomical and facial reconstruction. She comes out the other side with ongoing limitations and brutal chronic pain—but on the plus side, her new face is drop-dead gorgeous. While recovering at a fancy American medical facility, she meets Prince Ferdinand II, Finn to his friends, scion of Lucomo, a fictional European principality known for its world-class gambling casino. Caro and Finn cross paths a few more times before their cat-and-mouse game of attraction (“I thought with my skin,” she confesses) leads to Christmas Eve nuptials before an “ocean of strangers.” By then Caroline's undergone a rudely abrupt pelvic exam, dozens of hours of invasive interviews, and a jarring initiation into a life pinned into place by an army of dressers, servants, minders, bodyguards, and paparazzi plus wall-to-wall surveillance technology. As Bourland explains in an afterword, Caroline's nightmarish experiences are inspired by the story of Charlene Wittstock, the current Princess Consort of Monaco, a Zimbabwe-born Olympic swimmer who “allegedly made at least two failed escape attempts before her wedding to Prince Albert” and “spent the lavish ceremony sobbing openly.”

An immersive depiction of the glittering surface and rotten core of royal living, painted in sumptuous and chilling detail.