The Force of Such Beauty
Dutton, 2022
After a failed attempt at escape, the princess of a tiny kingdom begins to reevaluate her life.
Caroline, a former marathon runner who dropped out of school at fourteen to pursue an Olympic medal, was the perfect candidate for a tiara: shapely, disciplined, accustomed to public attention, and utterly uneducated.
After she meets Finn, the handsome prince of a small European kingdom, her fate is sealed. With a collar of pearls locked around her throat and a rope of diamonds leashing her to a balcony, Caroline uses her once-powerful body to smile, wave, and produce children with perfect grace.
But as she opens her eyes to the world around her—and examines her own reflection—Caroline discovers that she may have entered a bargain that cannot be undone.
Barbara Bourland’s stunning third novel is her most ambitious and most imaginative book to date. Inspired by the alleged escape attempts of real-life princesses and set in a grotesque and gaudy prerecession 2000s Europe, The Force of Such Beauty is a heart-wrenching and compulsively readable testament to the way in which real-life power structures around the world ultimately rest on the subjugation of women’s bodies.
“The Force of Such Beauty grips with the strength of an Olympian and holds it with the endurance of a marathoner. Bourland’s passionate storytelling transmogrifies into an insatiable urge to keep reading Caroline’s story even after its end — an ending that actually caught my breath, not once, but twice in quick succession.”—The Associated Press
Praise:
“This is not your grandma’s fairy tale… Bourland’s brilliant satire skewers the theatrics of power, excessive materialism and economic corruption.” —The Washington Post
“Sharp, witty, and intellectually intense, Bourland’s prose is a force to be reckoned with.” —The Chicago Review of Books
“A fascinating novel about bodies, the way we use them, and the way we break them. It’s one of several works to come out this year concerned with the appropriation of female beauty by powerful men, and examines a harsh choice in the lives of women dubbed desirable by the patriarchal state: do you participate, or do you say no?...Barbara Bourland is skilled at finding the noir in the everyday, and illustrating the mechanisms of control that keep us in our place." —CrimeReads, Best Books of the Year (So Far)
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“With trademark style and sophistication Bourland plays with the tropes of the princess tales, true and not, that we know as well as our own names as she giftedly conjures Caroline's glittering, threatening worlds. Despite danger everywhere, Caroline is the captivating narrator of her own story: a domestic drama, sparkling fairy tale, cautionary fable, and suspenseful mystery all laced into one.”
—Booklist (STARRED)
“…a smart, absorbing novel, with a heroine, Caroline, who’s naïve but strong-willed. A former Olympic-level marathon runner from South Africa, she’s seduced by her lavish life until the fantasy fractures and becomes a nightmare.” —AARP
"[O]ffers a smart critique of a corrupt world’s disenchanting effects on a naive young woman. The result is satisfyingly dark and twisted." —Publishers Weekly
"An immersive depiction of the glittering surface and rotten core of royal living, painted in sumptuous and chilling detail."—Kirkus
“Falling in love with a prince is not a fairy tale, as the protagonist of this engrossing novel discovers. Caroline is a former Olympian-turned-princess of a small European country. Her role becomes more like a trap; her husband, more like a captor. Bourland said she was inspired by real-life royals when writing this novel set in pre-recession Europe.”—Today.com
"'Happy ever after' is not all that it's cracked up to be. Barbara Bourland dismantles the conventional princess story in The Force of Such Beauty to explosively examine the real-life notions of fame, power, and womanhood."—Veranda
“Rich in emotion and luscious descriptions, The Force of Such Beauty is a careful dismantling of royalty that leaves readers wondering if any fairy tale is worth our desire.” —BookPage
Recommended Reading from The New York Post
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"In THE FORCE OF SUCH BEAUTY, Barbara Bourland fractures the familiar tale of 'happily ever after' and reimagines it with spectacular style, vision, and substance. Her novel thoughtfully interrogates the trappings of marriage, status, womanhood, and power, while reading as vividly and compulsively as a thriller." —Jung Yun, author of Shelter and O Beautiful
"The Force of Such Beauty is a dazzling spiderweb, a richly imagined, chilling spin on the girl-meets-prince fairy tale that scrambles notions of power and femininity. With a sense of spellbound dread, we’re seduced along with its complicated heroine into a magnetic world of startling beauty and tragic costs."—Lauren Acampora, author of The Paper Wasp
“A fierce spin on the fantasy of marriage that is pacey, propulsive and fun. Its dazzling, detailed and ultimately revolting catalogue of excess and materialism creates a compelling atmosphere of claustrophobia. I love how the fairy-tale setting cleverly draws one's thoughts from the personal implications of a marriage to the wider world of commerce, status and power.”—Ros Anderson, author of The Hierarchies
“A wayward girl is made a princess, and then? Luxury turns to boredom, fascination to fear, fame to thralldom, and love to betrayal. Threads of beauty and dread follow our heroine's descent into the gilded lunacy of a royal kingdom that requires a princess to be glamorous, grateful, and quiet. But Caro is no passive princess in a tower; she is smart, incisive, and achingly real. I couldn't put this book down until its explosive, heartrending, thoroughly satisfying ending.”—Jennie Melamed, author of Gather the Daughters