Wear it Like A Crown, by Zarah Detand

[Ulysses]

Wear it Like a Crown
By Zarah Detand
Published by the author, 2019
Five stars

OK, I loved this book. I loved that it was LONG, because all y’all really need to develop an adult attention span. For me, novellas are rarely satisfying, because they purposely skim over things that need depth. Here, I wallowed in the many pages, savoring the deep dive into Joshua and Leo’s minds. I adored the exploration of the interconnected friendships of the five gay, bi and straight modern young men. Yes, there were times when I snarled to myself: get the hell over it, Leo. But, I am a cynical old man, however romantic. One gets impatient with the maunderings of youth—even though I maundered rather a lot in my own youth.

I loved that the book spent very little time in Buckingham Palace, or with Joshua’s royal family, because the point of the book was the group of twenty-something men who form the emotional core of the story. The fact that Joshua lives independently in a chic flat in a great neighborhood might seem unlikely, based on what we know of current royal practice—but then again, this is a different royal family, more like today’s other European royals, who live relatively normal lives about which most of us know nothing. Queen Louise and Princess Emma, however brief their roles, were awesome and surprising, and I confess I would have liked to spend more time with them; but hey, Zarah Detand could always write a sequel. Happy ever after is a bloody long time, after all.

The author was very good on the careful reveals—building fragments of knowledge until we finally got the whole picture. I appreciated that Joshua was truly smart and good; and that, despite his dark curly hair, one could replace him with either of today’s actual royal princes if one wished. Part of the fun in these “different reality” stories is slotting in real-life royals with the clever fictional ones. I adored Leo, whose apparent lack of self-pity masked a deep shame that has crippled him emotionally without his own realization. Quite unexpectedly, Leo becomes a conduit for understanding how vulnerable all LGTBQ young people are, in spite of the improvements in the world today.

Equally welcome was the fact that the on-page sex is limited to critical moments in the narrative—so that it was not only hot, but emotionally on the nose. Corollary to that was my happiness that all of this was focused on the young men and their feelings, and not idiotic leering over body parts.

“Wear it Like a Crown” is in fact part of a small sub-genre of gay romance fiction—British Royal Coming Out romance. Who knew, right? The most popular of these books right now, because it is from a mainstream press and is getting big promotion, is Casey McQuiston’s charming “Red, White and Royal Blue.” Most interestingly parallel is Lilah Pace’s two-book series, “His Royal Secret” and “His Royal Favorite,” which spend a lot more time deep inside Buckingham Palace dealing with fallout among the fictitious royals. Oddly enough, the queen in that one is also Louise.

None of this works, of course, unless the author knows what she is doing, and Detand is pretty darn good. The book has its flaws, but nothing that derailed my constant pleasure as I read through it. Although it is about Leo and Joshua, it is also about Nate and his friendship with Leo; and about Tristan and Mo, and their devoted love of their friend Joshua. I hope millennials are, at least some of them, as endearing as this group of guys is.