I’m always up for a fairy tale, but this one leaves a lot to be desired. With a plot that never quite made sense and characters who do a lot of “telling”, there’s nothing here that comes even remotely to life. It’s not terrible, mind you, just…well, lackluster.

When Nicolas Argyle, fifth viscount of Newbern, spies a beautiful young maid on the island of Teleere who bears a striking resemblance to the princess of Sedonia. A loyal subject of his monarch, Nicol’s initial approach to the distrustful young woman results in a bash on the head and a missing watch.

Convinced the maid is a thief and with the seeds of an idea forming in his head, Nicol confronts the young woman at the inn where she works. Though Megan – the maid in question – denies that she is the young woman he met earlier, her protests don’t deter Nicol from his plan: He abducts Megan with the goal of training her to impersonate the princess. It seems the princess has a secret mission she wishes to perform without alerting her royal advisors to her absence.

What follows next is a classic Pygmalion sequence in which aristocratic Nicol teaches the roughly raised young woman how to speak, dress, and act. (Mysteriously, though she lives on an island far from England, Megan’s “lower class” dialect seems to be Cockney.) And all the while, of course, an attraction grows between the two.

I haven’t read Ms. Greiman before, but a quick check of the AAR review of The Princess and her Pirate would indicate that the action in both books occur simultaneously. Frankly, I was glad to have that clarified because from the story here I never did gain a good understanding of just why the princess needed to disappear so secretly and Greiman is pretty stingy about revealing any information on this subject. (I don’t know about you, but it’s kind of hard for me to relax and enjoy a book when my brow is more or less permanently furrowed.)

As for the characters, I never really felt like I got to know them at all. Megan, who’s had a tough time making her way in the world, understandably doesn’t like noblemen and is, of course, both spunky and feisty. Nicol is more or less a classic rakehell with a tortured childhood, except he’s devoted to his princess. That’s about all I can really tell you about either one of them.

On the positive side, Ms. Greiman’s prose flows nicely and her dialogue (when she’s not painfully recreating Cockney, that is) sings. But, with a plot that never really came together and the two-dimensional characterizations of both the hero and heroine, the positives only raise The Princess Masquerade to that of a slightly below average read.

As much as I love magical (and improbable) tales of princes and princesses, I can’t recommend this book for any reader looking for a fairy tale fix. Yep, there’s a princess here, but, sadly, the magic is in very short supply.