#BlogTour: The Royal Daughter by Soraya Lane

For this blog tour, we’re looking at . For this blog tour, we’re looking at The Riyal Daughter by Soraya Lane.

Here’s what I had to say on the review sites (Goodreads, Hardcover.app, TheStoryGraph, BookHype):

Strong Dual Timeline Emotional Rollercoaster. This is a book about finding yourself and doing your own thing – even when everything and everyone is against you. It is about finding family you never knew you had. It is about unravelling decades old family secrets… that you didn’t even know were secrets. It is about falling in love, a few times over – at least once in each timeline, + falling in love with a new land.

As Lane has done throughout this series, she yet again shows remarkable skill in bringing together the two halves of her former writing – the romance + the historical fiction – in a genuinely compelling, but only very loosely coupled, series. Indeed, while other *groups* of authors have, over the last several years in particular, come together with similar loosely coupled “series” where each can be read as standalone, all tied together by some theme or some macguffin… with this series, Lane manages to create a much more cohesive single author version of the gimmick that still maintains the “can be read as standalone” allure of this gimmick. In doing so, in many ways she changes it from a marketing gimmick to her own (so far unique, at least in my own reading) almost genre, really. Because this tale, and this series, isn’t *just* romance, though it fills every (mostly “clean” / “sweet” / “behind closed doors”) requirement for the romance genre that I’m aware of, even by its more strict interpretations. This book isn’t *just* historical fiction, though again, it fills every requirement I’m aware of for the genre (which are much looser generally than romance). And while Lane truly excels in both spaces – and I think I’ve said this next bit before in other reviews of this series – she truly comes to her full ultimate power in combining them so effectively and beautifully.

And speaking of effective and beautiful… be forewarned here: there are sections near the end where the room gets extremely dusty all of a sudden. To the point that some readers may cry out for an Audible version of the tale, as it may genuinely become impossible to read the words on the page with your eyeballs due to the amount of dust in the room. (To be clear… men don’t cry. But sometimes, sometimes rooms get extremely dusty – and it may *look* like we’re crying or even bawling as we try to keep the dust out of our eyes. 😉 )

Very much recommended.

After the jump, an excerpt from the book followed by the “publisher details” – book description, author bio, and social media and buy links.

Book Description:
“My darling B, my heart, my soul. I only wish we’d had longer. Longer to search for the daughter that I should never have given up. The daughter that I should have been brave enough to keep, brave enough to tell you about, brave enough to tell the world about.”

London, present day. As Ella looks down at a faded black and white photograph of an unknown woman and child alongside a yellowing piece of sheet music, she wonders how the two things can possibly relate to her own family. The items were left for her family at Hope’s House, a home for unmarried mothers whose babies were adopted.

Soon Ella learns that the photograph was taken on the picturesque Greek island of Skopelos, nestled in the turquoise calming waters of the Aegean sea, and that the woman in the photo holds the key to her family’s heritage. As she opens up to her new flame Gabriel, he tells her that she should go to the island to unravel the mystery and that he will wait for her.

Though Ella is torn she decides to go and once there, she discovers a heart-wrenching story of a royal family forced to leave their country for a new life in London, and of a girl with a unique talent for music who captured the heart of a young violinist but was forced to leave him and London behind for the sake of her family.

When Ella discovers the sacrifice made by the two young lovers and comes face to face with her forgotten Greek family, will their story give her the courage to follow her own heart back to London and Gabriel, or will the beauty of the island capture her heart and lead her to a new love altogether?

A totally addictive and heartbreaking novel about the strength of family ties and never giving up on true love. Perfect for fans of Santa Montefiore, Lucinda Riley and Victoria Hislop.

Author Bio:
Soraya Lane graduated with a law degree before realizing that law wasn’t the career for her and that her future was in writing. She is the author of historical and contemporary women’s fiction, including the #1 Kindle bestselling novels The Last Correspondent and The Secrets We Left Behind.
Soraya lives on a small farm in her native New Zealand with her husband, their two young sons and a collection of four legged friends. When she’s not writing, she loves to be outside playing make-believe with her children or snuggled up inside reading.