Of Crowns and Cantytowns

She’ll trick a pauper into wearing her crown to satisfy her own wanderlust.

Princess Sarina’s greatest dream is to travel, but her overprotective father insists on keeping her close to home. Simply running away isn’t working, since she never gets very far before she’s caught. When she fortuitously meets a pauper girl who looks like her twin, Sarina believes she’s found the missing piece to make her travel plans come true. All she has to do is trick the pauper into taking her place so nobody will realize the true princess is gone. Then she’ll be free to see the kingdoms to her heart’s content – at least, until the switch is revealed.

Alec Hendon has been a mercenary fighting on foreign soil for seven years, and now he’s finally ready to go home. Once back, however, he begins to think he shouldn’t have stayed away so long. His beloved home of Carabas and his family are not the same as he’d left them. Additionally, the pauper villages, known as Cantytowns, are more numerous and teem with dangerous gangs and slave traders. People from all the classes live in a growing fear of the king. And the worst part of all? When he finally sees his cousin again, she doesn’t remember him.

In all her great travel plans, Sarina didn’t count on running into a retired mercenary who believes she is his cousin (the very pauper she tricked into switching places), but can he save her from the perilous road ahead?

Of Crowns andCantytowns is a mash-up retelling of Mark Twain’s classic novel, The Prince and the Pauper, and the beloved fairy tale, Puss in Boots. This book is part of A Twist of Tales, a series of nonmagical, Christian genderbent fairy tale retellings with epic adventures and animal companions.