Sapphire and Ruby

by Mark King

2nd Edition

Stephen Sapphire, a film major in search of a Hollywood romance, discovers he is the heir apparent to the throne of Cordonia, a mysterious kingdom off the coast of Portugal. The current queen, Marcela, invites him for a royal visit, and provides him with a noble escort, the irksome, but irresistible, Terrence Rubino.

The Book of Trou, an ancient prophecy, says Stephen must marry the queen. His mother, Leocadia, a powerful witch, prepares a love potion to actualize the prophecy, unaware that he is gay. Stephen would much rather spend time with Terrence than the queen. But he may not get a choice in the matter.

1st Edition published as Sapphire and Ruby, A Novella, March 2011

Genres: M M Romance

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 17, 2014

Reviews

[CB · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, entertaining fairy tale. It was a bit complicated for such a short story and yes, there are some flaws editing should have caught but, if you read it strictly for a quickie, it was worth it.

[Mike]

I kept wanting to like this book - the setting and general plot outline were extremely intriguing to me. The mix of magic and witchcraft with royal plotlines and a gay heir apparent to a throne struck me as highly original, an interesting and novel approach to "suddenly royal" stories. Heck, I even found the setting of a fictional European monarchy where English was a common language to be more well-founded and "believable" than many other countries invented for royal romances.

However, I found most of the writing to be often awkward and eye-rolling. I tried to think of it as a "fairy tale," and just let those developments and dialog that seemed to be too simplistic and difficult to swallow simply pass and chalk them up to a "simple, sappy, fairy tale" vibe. However, 2/3rds of the way through I just couldn't keep going.

[bazinga ~Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good part of the beginning reads like a book synopsis and I actually paged forward looking for the fIrst chapter. Then I looked at the table of contents and realized that was really how the book starts. I continued reading mostly because the book is short but it didn't improve much. Also near the end, MC Stephen was referred to as MC Terrance which is a pet peeve but not entirely the author's fault since I always think someone somewhere in the publishing process should catch things like that. The idea was good just not well executed. The cover is very pretty.