After a failed escape attempt, the princess of a tiny kingdom begins to reevaluate her life.
Caroline, a former marathon runner who dropped out of school at fourteen to pursue an Olympic medal, was the perfect candidate for a tiara: shapely, disciplined, accustomed to public attention, and utterly uneducated. When she meets Finn, the handsome prince of a small European kingdom, her fate is sealed. With a collar of pearls locked around her throat, and a rope of diamonds leashing her to a balcony, Caroline uses her once-powerful body to smile, wave, and produce children with perfect grace.
But as she begins to open her eyes to the world around her – and examine her own reflection – Caroline discovers that she may have entered a bargain that cannot be undone.
Barbara Bourland’s stunning third novel is her softest, strangest book to date. Inspired by the alleged escape attempts of real-life princesses, and set in a grotesque and gaudy pre-recession 2000s Europe, The Force of Such Beauty is a heart-wrenching and compulsively readable testament to the way in which real-life power structures around the world ultimately rest on the subjugation of women’s bodies.
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MY REVIEW:
The Force of Such Beauty by Barbara Bourland is a 2022 Dutton publication.
Oh, my goodness. What a chilling story!
By now, the fantasy of being a princess in real life has been tarnished. I think the reality of that life is not as hidden as it once was, and we’ve seen the tragedy of it play out in real time. That life, behind those castle walls, at the very least, is all about duty- it is not a life entirely your own, and I’m sure it is often very lonely and isolating. That duty may extend to the marriage as well- perhaps arranged- or sadly, as we’ve seen before- it could be a one-sided affair- and of course the pressure to provide heirs- but in this book we examine a situation that shows an even darker side of royalty…
Caroline is an Olympic athlete until her body gives out causing her to take a bad fall, where she lands hard, face first. This injury requires plastic surgery and lots of physical therapy, which is where she meets Finn. His stay in rehab is brief, but the two meet again, resulting in a complicated romance and engagement. But Caroline is clueless about Finn’s life as the heir of a small principality…
When reality sets in, Caroline decides to leave, only to be ambushed and ushered back to Finn, where he convinces her to go through with the marriage. Caroline learns soon enough that this is no fairy tale as her every move is monitored and her repeated attempts at escape are continuously thwarted…
Caroline’s voice is haunting and human. Her life is a nightmare, her choices limited, as she is held captive in a prison disguised a castle.
The story is cautionary in tone, powerfully unsettling and hard to come to terms with.
What makes it so difficult to absorb is that the novel is somewhat based on a real princess, and some of the elements in this novel are substantiated facts. More unnerving is that in real life this princess is struggling and that makes this tale even more troubling…
Overall, I admit I knew nothing of the real-life drama this book is based on, and now that I’ve done a little research, I have been plagued with a sense of sadness and claustrophobic foreboding I can’t seem to shake. Maybe this book should be in the thriller category!
GRAB A COPY HERE:
https://www.amazon.com/Force-Such-Beauty-Novel-ebook/dp/B09JW14QV5/
https://www.amazon.com/Force-Such-Beauty-Novel/dp/B09LJV3RHH/
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-force-of-such-beauty-barbara-bourland/
ABOUT THE A UTHOR:
Barbara Bourland is a novelist living in Baltimore. Her third novel, The Force of Such Beauty, follows a retired Olympic athlete who marries a prince, and will be published by Dutton in 2022.
Bourland’s novels use imaginative escapism to process an emotional condition (in chronological order: I’ll Eat When I’m Dead, the compulsion to control our appearance; Fake Like Me, the worry that we aren’t good enough; The Force of Such Beauty, the desire to be special) endemic to contemporary women’s lives. Cast in the mold of universal literary forms—the detective story, the thriller, the fairytale—they weave in and out of their genres, until the plot turns inside out and the narrative, upon reflection, appears to be something else entirely.
She’s at work on her fourth novel, Fields and Waves, forthcoming from Dutton in 2024.
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