cover image Royal Blue

Royal Blue

Christina Oxenberg. Simon & Schuster, $21.5 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-684-80093-6

Nestled in the center of this fiction debut by Oxenberg (Taxi) is a gem of a novella that's unfortunately obscured by a fragmented narrative that spans 10 years yet never really goes anywhere. Maria Moses is the daughter of beautiful and zany Princess Helena, of defunct European lineage, who, between trust fund disbursements, makes her living appearing on talk shows and helping to sell jewelry designs. In 1987, while the prepubescent Maria is visiting Cairngorm Castle in Scotland with her mother and current stepfather, she learns of the tragic death of her best friend in the States. Her mother's blithe reaction to the death is emblematic of Helena's lack of nurturing skills: she takes Maria's grief as obstinacy and ships her off to a boarding school filled with compulsives, epileptics and murderous children. When Maria returns to her mother's London home three years later, she finds new owners and a somewhere-in-America forwarding address. Parts one and three of the novel are told by Maria a decade later as she plucks at threads of old relationships, lives off the kindness of acquaintances and barters her legacy for the promise of security from a married man. The descriptions of the mother's unraveling lifestyle are delicious and always convincing, perhaps because Oxenburg is herself the daughter of Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. What the story misses in terms of coherent structure and plot development, it makes up for in the effervescence of Maria's voice, which can range, in a few sentences, from wild despair to sharp-tongued sarcasm or childish delight. (June)