Crowned - Jennifer Chance (Crowns & Gowns #4)

Crowned is the conclusion to the main "arc" of Jennifer Chance's Gowns and Crowns series, though it seems like there is a spin-off fifth book, Cursed, in the works which will move the story away from the fictional Garronia and onto US soil.  In the meantime, Crowned is about the last of four American friends visiting Garronia to not have been set up with a romantic interest: Fran.  In the wake of the rescue of the amnesiac crown prince, Fran is pulled in to act as a sort of companion and to help him remember himself, which the queen thinks will happen because Fran is young and pretty and oh yeah, she's a graduate psychology student with her focus for the past year having been on soldiers with PTSD.  It's this that really made me have serious reservations about this book--though there were other glaring problems, too--because a therapist having a relationship with a patient is a huge, huge no-no.

Now, Chance makes it very explicit throughout the book that Fran is not technically Ari's therapist...and yet she really is acting as one, and I feel like in this case it's the spirit of the thing rather than the letter of it that really made the big difference. 

Chance has a knack for writing both steamy and sweet interactions, but her plots themselves really weakened as this series went on.  For example, in this book, Ari eventually does start to regain his memories--I'm not going to get into that part of it, because I'm not really qualified to--and yet he has no problem that Fran, and all of his other friends and family, decided to keep his identity a secret and let him walk around Garronia like a nobody when pretty much everyone who saw him had at least some idea of who he was.  He has no problems that Fran slept with him under, essentially, false pretexts.  There's absolutely no questioning of any of her actions or why she kept any of the secrets she did; none of them are hugely harmful, and yet the very fact that she felt the need to do so, and had broken laws in the process of doing so for no good reason except that she felt like it, really seemed to have no effect on anyone.  What?  What is in the water in Garronia that the fact that their apparent future queen is a complete fake does not bother them?  Is the royal family planning on perpetuating this lie for all eternity?  Surely someday, someone would recognize Fran and go, "Hey, isn't that...?"

I think this series has made abundantly clear that plot is not Chance's strong point.  The romantic interactions are right on-point, sweet when they need to be and steamy when you want them to be, but the plots that surround and hold up these romances are very weak and can really take away from the romance as a whole.  I am still curious to read Cursed, whenever it comes out, but I had serious, serious reservations about this book, and I don't think it was a great end to the main series.

2.5 stars out of 5.

Claimed - Jennifer Chance (Crowns & Gowns #3)

Claimed follows up on Captured, and is the third book in Jennifer Chance's Crowns & Gowns series.  The main character int his one is Nicki Clark, the windsurfing, rock climbing, trouble making member of the quartet.  And then there's her love interest, Stefan, who is repeatedly called an ambassador but evidently isn't, and is instead some random bureaucrat related to the royal family.  He certainly never serves as an ambassador, and there's no mention of him doing so in the past or future, that's for sure.  Stefan and Nicki are already attracted to each other at the beginning of the book, having been playing with each other for the few weeks that Nicki and her friends have been in Garronia already, but things get amped up when Nicki volunteers to serve as a cover story so Stefan and some other officials can go to Turkey, which is on bad terms with Garronia, and look for the Crown Prince, Ari, who disappeared in a plane crash a year ago.  The area where they think Ari is happens to be hosting a windsurfing competition that Nicki covered before, so her presence there as a travel writer supposedly makes sense.  I don't totally buy this thinking; involving not only a civilian, but a foreign civilian, and the best friend of the girl who's slated to marry the heir to the throne, doesn't really seem like a sound strategy, even if she does have a (tenuous) connection to the area you're going to.

This book is, again, much plot-heavier than the first in the series.  It's also not as well-edited as its predecessors.  There's the issue of Stefan being called an ambassador when he's not; that Nicki thinks Lauren has told Em and Fran about Nicki's heart condition, when it was stated in the second book that Em already knew because she and Nicki had been college roommates; that Henry Smithson was Lauren's ex, when they were never actually together... You get the idea.  Chance started contradicting numerous things that she had already established, and it started grating on me.  They were all small things, but they all added up and basically told me that she wasn't keeping track of what she was actually writing down.  And then there are numerous editorial errors, too--typos, missing punctuation marks (particularly quotation marks), and mis-used words.  It's rather disappointing, because the first two books were well-edited and I don't see why that should have suddenly changed here.

The plot is fun, with Nicki trying to be all "secret agent" while basically having a fling with Stefan, but again, I couldn't really take it too seriously and it made the whole thing a little hard to refrain from rolling my eyes at.  There were a few things that seemed like they would develop into something, but didn't--when Nicki's windsurfing board malfunctions, for example, I was all primed to find out it was an act of sabotage from someone who'd guessed what she and Stefan were up to, but it never amounted to anything and just faded into the background.  And the ease with which Nicki and Stefan ultimately accomplished their mission was somewhat of a joke, too, and only served for the "big reveal" about Nicki's condition, which she stupidly kept secret the entire time because hey, you're so gung-ho about this mission, why not risk jeopardizing it?  (And seriously, what's the deal with all this fainting and near-fainting and heart-racing business if it's ultimately nothing?  It seems like, even if Nicki never actually got checked out, she'd be aware of her body's needs with hydration, etc. to keep it somewhat under control after hiding it for so long.)

Stefan and Nicki's relationship was lighthearted and serious at the same time, but the plot in this was so unbalanced.  They were essentially already together, so it couldn't really count as a full-blown romance, and yet the spy/rescue mission plot wasn't really well-developed enough for it to serve as a novel in that genre, either.  Overall, it felt a bit uneven and not sure of what it wanted to be.  I'm still looking forward to Fran's book, but this one was disappointing in relation to the great improvement that occurred in Captured.

3 stars out of 5.

Captured - Jennifer Chance (Crowns & Gowns #2)

Following up on Courted, I liked it enough to pick up Captured--and despite a few issues with Captured, I liked this one enough to buy the last two books in the quartet (I think it's just a quartet!) so that should give you some indication of how this went.

Captured picks up basically right where Courted left off, but with different main characters, of course.  Lauren is the heroine in this one, and the hero is hunky bodyguard Dimitri--bodyguard and client are one of my favorite pairing tropes, which was one of the reasons I went for this one!  Lauren and her friends are still hanging out in Garronia following Em's engagement to Prince Kristos, and figuring out what they're going to do next.  Lauren slips away from a party to go down into the city and get drunk with the locals, and Dimitri follows to bring her back...at which point she discovers a package hanging out in the palace that she recognizes.  It's from Henry Smithson, who has been sending Lauren packages in that style for years.  Sometimes they contain lavish gifts--clothes, jewels, etc.  Sometimes they contain more sinister things, like spiders, scorpions, or even what she suspects are the ashes of the family dog that went missing.  But Henry is one of her father's best friends and business partners, and haven't believed her in the past when she expressed her feelings that something is very wrong with him, that he's stalking her, etc. and she's convinced the pattern is going to continue now.  But it doesn't, because unlike her parents, Dimitri and the royal family, particularly Queen Catherine, believe her.  And when Henry shows up with Lauren's parents at Kristos and Em's engagement party and tries to coerce Lauren into marrying him, they (well, Dimitri) spirits her off to safety.

Dimitri and Lauren are one of those couples that are attracted to each other, but get on each other's nerves.  Dimitri annoys Lauren because he's a little overbearing, and she frustrates him because she acts like an ice queen when he suspects she's really not.  I really liked this dynamic, and how it slowly began to unwind once Lauren felt safely away from Henry for a while.  The chemistry between the two main characters was definitely there, and for most of the book I think it progressed in a logical manner.  I wasn't rolling my eyes at insta-love the way I was for the entire first half of Courted.  The whole "Lauren has a stalker" thing was a much darker and more menacing plot line than the "oh the media thinks we're together" plot that propelled Courted, and I think it was a nice change.  And this plot also gears up the "search for the missing prince" plot that Courted only hints at.

That said, I did still have a few issues with this.  For the most part, I think the romance progressed in a sensible way, but it did make a big jump to "Oh btw I love you and want to be with you forever" at the end, which seemed very abrupt in the face of how it had been building for the rest of the book.  There's also an attempt to redeem Lauren's parents that I don't think really worked out.  For so much of the book, they were portrayed as not caring, and then suddenly at the end they were like, "Oh, we cared the whole time, we just couldn't do anything about it then," which didn't sit right with me.  I think Lauren's relationship with her parents in light of the whole Henry thing would have suffered a lot more, and the way it was so neatly tied up just didn't seem to fit properly.

That said, this does lay out the plot for the next book nicely, and I'm looking forward to it.  Despite the darker plot of this book, it's still a pretty light series--but I think the plot here tempered it and helped stop it from being too sickly-sweet.  The third book, Claimed, looks like it might be along the same lines, which is good!

3.5 stars out of 5.