(no subject)

I kind of can't remember if Sherwood Smith's A Posse of Princesses is hypothetically tied into one of her larger universes or not. It stands perfectly well alone, anyway; one of those charming swashbuckling comedies of manners that involves a bunch of balls and swordfights but the real point is personal growth!

Our Heroine Rhis is the princess of a tiny mountain kingdom who loves BALLADS and ADVENTURE and whose first trip outside the kingdom involves a giant month-long house party in another, bigger kingdom, the point of which is to introduce the prince of said kingdom to ~all the eligible ladies~.

Aside from Rhis, main characters include:

- Prince Lios, who is charming and handsome and clearly having a blast, but seems to spend a lot of time conferring privately with
- Prince Lios' cute scribe, who seems to know massive amounts about foreign languages and diplomacy!

(I called where this was headed from the introduction of these characters, and I do enjoy how it was handled, though I would also have been A-OK with it turning out not that way too.)

- Rhis' new BFF, who like Rhis loves ballads and who also loves boys (but has a boyfriend at home! so she totally can't date any of the cute guys at the party! right? ...right?)
- Lios' sweet foreign cousin who is extremely great at lots of things but extremely bad at speaking the local language
- that warrior princess from the local tribe of horse nomads
- That Beautiful Mean Girl

(Sherwood Smith always has That Beautiful Mean Girl, and I always hope she's going to turn out to have inner depths after a rocky start and it never happens, alas. I did appreciate Lesser Mean Girl who grew out of being a mean girl and into an all-consuming obsession with horses. Well done, Lesser Mean Girl! Make something of your life!)

- that guy who is super into Rhis' new BFF (but she has a boyfriend at home! so she totally can't date any of the cute guys at the party! right? ...right?)
- that guy who's the son of the local troublemaking evil warlord, which obviously was never going to go wrong

So all these people hang out and have courtly drama until something snaps enough that they all get to have swashbuckling chase scenes across the country, and everyone starts growing into themselves and learning important things about their characters, and eventually all turns out well and it's all deeply charming! And Rhis has a romance and that's also very charming!

And then ( spoilers for the ending which is clearly Making A Point which is valid but which I also think is slightly silly )