Books: Real/Fake Princess Volume 5

The great thing about Real/Fake Princess, for me, has been how it has kept the complete courage of its convictions. The bare outlines of the story are fairly standard romance fodder: a man and a woman, each one fiery and independent in their own ways, grow closer together during a shared crisis and discover love. There’s a billion romance novels with this plot, but how the plot is played out makes all the difference, and R/FP somehow, amazingly, never manages to make a wrong step.

The final volume of the series takes everything that has been building through the course of this story and pushes it all the way to the conclusion it deserves. I could not ask for more. It gives us the “real/fake” princess of the title, Zhi Li, now in hiding from her enemies in power, and reunited at last with both Wu and Hui Tang — both of whom she has powerful and conflicting feelings for — in a rebel encampment. There is a fair amount of other plotting swirling around them during this last volume, but the really important stuff involves Zhi Li and the two men in her life, and that’s what I’ll focus on here.

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