@TastyBookTours Guest Post: Falling for Prince Charles by Lauren Baratz-Logsted (@LaurenBaratzL)

Falling for Prince Charles


Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Genre: Chick Lit
Publisher: Diversion Books
Date of Publication: February 9, 2016
Number of pages: 320

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"Lauren Baratz-Logsted has mastered the real life fairy tale in her explosive and hilarious FALLING FOR PRINCE CHARLES. It's all here, lovelorn Daisy Silverman flush with cash and high hopes, Prince Charles who can't resist her, and London in all its splendor. Curl up and get ready to laugh long into the foggy night." —Adriana Trigiani, New York Times bestselling author of THE SHOEMAKER'S WIFE

Daisy Silverman has always been obsessed with His Royal Highness, Prince Charles. When the underachieving 30-something cleaning lady wins a million dollars, she follows her lifelong dream to go to London. Once there, she meets Prince Charles—the real Prince Charles. Through a series of misunderstandings, the Royal Family doesn't realize that Daisy's Jewish or that she's spent her life up to the elbows in the wrong kind of toilet water. By the time they do, Daisy is in love with Charles, Charles is in love with Daisy, and the Queen's white gloves are off. FALLING FOR PRINCE CHARLES is an offbeat alternate-universe romantic comedy showing the heir to the British throne in a light quite unlike any he's been seen in before.

Excerpt: 

As Daisy Silverman squatted in front of the toilet bowl, first depressing the flush lever and then watching as the milky outgoing spiral removed the mildew and replaced it with fresh water, the thought occurred to her for at least the thousandth time that if the fickle hand of fate hadn’t cast her as a cleaning lady, working in wealthy households and offices in Westport, Connecticut, she would most certainly have made a perfectly lovely Princess of Wales.

This was a fantasy that Daisy had entertained off and on since 1981, the same year that the late Princess Diana had first become Princess Diana. And to this day, eighteen years later, whenever she thought about it, Daisy still thought that she could have done the job better.

Oh, sure, Daisy had loved the late Princess, would have said that she loved her more than anybody. Well, actually even Daisy was aware enough not to say that; she did know that Diana’s family and friends had surely loved her more. But Daisy could legitimately claim to love her easily as much as anybody who had never met her, and that was plenty. So, if Daisy felt a little competitive with a dead Princess that she had loved beyond reason, what matter that? After all, there were some compelling reasons for making a comparison between the two women.

Just like the woman who had possessed the most photographed profile in the world, Daisy had a genius for making the kind of seemingly interested, throwaway comment that left others feeling a little cheerier about their own lot in life. Although even Daisy had felt that the Princess had been pushing things a bit, several years back, when she had blithely informed a widow on the dole with a flat full of small children: “Oh, yes, I just love those microwave pizzas too. Whenever the Heir and the Spare start to look a little peaked, I just nuke a couple of them in the Palace micro, and we’re all set to go skiing in Klosters or windsurfing on Necker.” Or, if those hadn’t been her exact words, it had been something equally inappropriate...

Guest Post: 

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO GETTING PUBLISHED

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

I don’t know if this would qualify as funny, unless we use the definition of it that includes peculiar; or, in my case, perhaps we should define it as could only happen to Lauren.

FALLING FOR PRINCE CHARLES was originally the second novel I wrote, after walking away from my day job as an independent bookseller to take a chance on myself as a writer. The novel is about a Jewish cleaning lady from Danbury who meets and falls in love with the heir to the British throne, the man we all know as Prince Charles. You could say it’s an alternate-universe romantic comedy since it’s about real people but living lives they never did. Once I completed it, I sent it out on submission in early 1997.

If you’re up on your British history, you may guess where this story is going.

On August 31 of that same year, Prince Charles’s ex-wife, Princess Diana – one of the two most beloved women of the second half of the last century, the other being Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – died tragically in a car crash. While I may be a big fan of Prince Charles, at the time I was an even bigger fan of Princess Diana, and so I mourned with the whole world.

I didn’t even think about my stupid book.

Two weeks later, my phone rang. Publishing wisdom back then always dictated that “No comes in a letter; yes comes during a phone call.” The latter was true because editors loved that Cinderella moment of calling an author, waving the wand of “You’re going to be published!” and getting to hear the author’s excitement at the happy news.

In my case, a publisher was calling me – a vice president at one of the biggest publishing companies in the country, no less – only she wasn’t calling with happy news. She was calling because she wanted to tell me personally that as much as she loved my book, she couldn’t buy it; no one in publishing could buy it.

And I knew immediately that she was right.

Worldwide public sentiment was so against Charles in those weeks and first years of the aftermath, no one would be interested in my story of Charles finally finding true love.

So the book went into my closet, meaning it remained on my hard drive, for almost two decades. To be sure, occasionally it got brushed off for various reasons – to detail everything would take this post to novella length – and I did revise it time and time again.

Now it’s being published – at last! – by Diversion Books, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Although if it brings joy to at least some readers, if it helps take your mind off trouble in your own lives and makes you laugh, I’ll be more than pleased. I and my book will have our happy ending.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of over 30 books for adults (The Thin Pink Line; The Sisters Club), teens (The Twin’s Daughter; The Education of Bet; Little Women and Me) and children (The Sisters 8 series for young readers which she created with her husband and daughter). Read more about her at www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com or follow her @LaurenBaratzL on Twitter.
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Author Bio:

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of over 25 books for adults, teens (including The Twin’s Daughter and Little Women and Me), and children (The Sisters 8, a nine-book series she created with her husband and daughter). Before becoming an author, Lauren was an independent bookseller, freelance editor, Publishers Weekly reviewer, sort-of librarian and window washer. She lives with her family in Danbury, CT.

To connect with the author online:

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