Review: "London on My Mind" by Clara Alves

London on My Mind by Clara Alves
Translated by Nina Perrotta
Published June 2024 via Push
★★★

Dayana has always wanted to go to London—but not like this. When her mother dies, she's sent from Rio to live with her father in London...and with her father's wife and stepdaughter, whom Dayana has never met. The one bright spot in her new life is Diana, whom Dayana meets when Diana is climbing over a fence to escape from Buckingham Palace...and who, you can imagine, has a secret or two.

Now, I'm a sucker for princess fantasies and for moving-to-a-different-country stories, so this seemed right up my alley. It's a very quick read (I started it on the way home from work and hit 70% before bed; finished it on the way to the gym the following morning) and something of an alternate-universe story—in this storyline, Princess Diana is alive and well (and royalty in her own right rather than someone who married into a particularly complicated family) and pulling quite a lot of strings. (I think the book is supposed to take place a bit in the future—say another ten years from now—and Dayana is young enough to reference 'the late 1900s', which...I am dead.) I'd probably have preferred a moving-to-Rio book, just because I am so much less familiar with Brazil than with England, but...you take what you can get! (And since I believe the author is Brazilian—and the book is translated from Portuguese—it makes sense that London would be considered the far-off-and-interesting place.)

The description calls this an 'unlikely London romance', though, and that...seems about right. I ended up wishing that the royalty plotline hadn't made it through edits, because it feels the least fleshed-out of the parts, and a lot of things just don't make sense. (Someone climbing over the fence at Buckingham Palace? In heels and a dress? Repeatedly? And not getting caught? Or Dayana thinking that 'staking out' Buckingham Palace to see if someone goes in should involve going to the front, public, swarmed-with-tourists entrance... Or not thinking twice about having a messy make-out session in front of piles of tabloidy press...) I enjoy some fluffy wish fulfillment, but I also want logical underpinnings.

Dayana is a teenager, and she's dealing with messy emotions involving grief and abandonment, and these things inform her character heavily. They don't always make her likeable—one of the first things Dayana does is scream at her stepmother for being well-intentioned but overwhelming—but they do make her feel realistically teenaged. The push-pull of new family dynamics is interesting, and I appreciated that her relationship with her stepmother and stepsister is allowed to be complicated (not always good, not always bad). I did wish Dayana could have a bit more external focus, though: even as the book progresses, she tends to hear someone else's story and make it all about her own story and what she's going through. And those things are valid (and again, very in line with a teenager who still has some growing up to do!), but so are the other characters' stories. Dayana will probably be most relatable to those who experience their emotions as big and bursting.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.