Although this Sci-Fi romantic comedy is a serious contender for the description of being the silliest book I have ever read, I must confess that it was also quite entertaining and did make me laugh.
The basis for the story is that our galaxy contains two major powers, both led by members of a superhuman race called "Great Djinn." The first is the Empire of the "Communicating words" under god-Emperor Djerrold Vulcan V and his son, Crown Prince Tarrant-Aragon, the Tiger prince. The other power in the galaxy is the "Saurian Knights" who are described as a cross between the United Nations, N.A.T.O, and the Freemasons. Their leader is the "Saurian Dragon" whose identity is a closely guarded secret.
The story starts in Cambridge on earth, which is a protected world and not part of either power, presumably because we have not yet discovered space travel. A young woman called Djinna-Vera, who is secretly descended both from the Imperial Dynasty and from prominent members of the Saurian Knights' leadership, is living in Cambridge as "Jinny," appearing to be a very intelligent and beautiful but otherwise quite normal 19 year old undergraduate. In reality she is half-Djinn and a member of the Saurian Knights.
The wicked prince Tarrant Arragon has discovers that a half-Djinn woman has been living on earth, and sees an opportunity to sire an heir, so he decides to kidnap and marry Jinny. However, he wants the marriage to be a love match, so after the kidnap he disguises his true identity, and tries to woo Jinny and persuade her to fall in love with him.
Jinny is not certain who her kidnapper is. She even wonders if he may be her pledged fiance, JJ, another Djinn in the service of the Saurians. Meanwhile, JJ and the Saurians have their own plots to overthrow Tarrant Aragon - which go disastrously, embarrassingly, and amusingly wrong ...
And all the time the evil prince Tarrant Aragon is proving much more complex than he at first appeared ...
I didn't think that Rowena Cherry was going to be able to keep this story going for the length of a full book without it collapsing under the weight of contradictions and silliness, but in fact it does manage to stagger to an amusing conclusion.
There is a sequel, "Insufficient Mating Material" which follows up the story of JJ and Tarrang-Aragon's sister Martia-Djulia in much the same kind of style.
Don't touch this if you are either PC or prudish, it's fairly raunchy and very politically incorrect. Nor if you want your reading to be serious or worthy. But if you want to read something ridiculous, light hearted, and mildly amusing, you may well enjoy "Forced Mate."
