The book 'Prisoner of Zenda' has inspired many other works and adaptations including the film 'Dave' with Kevin Kline. Its hard to know where this version sits. I could call it a reimagining, or a parody or a blatant ripoff.
Whatever you call it, all i care about is whether its any good and for a while there it was.
The first half of it which is the rewrite of 'Prisoner of Zenda' is quite fun and actually a little more entertaining than the original in my opinion.
The second-half based on the sequel to Zenda (i'm assuming) however just really outstayed its welcome and i got quite bored with it by the end. It has several major plot errors as well which don't help, and many more coincidences and Deus ex machina's than the first half.
There's an excellent version of this on Libravox which i started listening too, once i got bored with reading it. ( )

Weird and wonderful. It's very pulpy - action for the sake of action, and very unclear motives. There's one awful (awfully silly) scene near the beginning where they're each firmly convinced the other is mad - he with rather less reason than she. There's also some confusion about exactly how similar Leopold and Barney are - in the first half, she knows instantly that it's a different man, and Barney himself says the resemblance is superficial. In the second, she can only tell who's who by where he was wounded. Time seems a little flexible, too - Barney spends a week lurking after he crossed the border? But the Austrians were crossing as he was - did no one notice them for a week, then the previously-shown events happened? Whatever. It's definitely not one of his best, but it's a fun read (once I made it past the silly scene) and I'll likely reread it. I also now want to reread The Prisoner of Zenda (I've basically forgotten the story, but the gimmick is the same) and Andre Norton's The Prince Commands (because the interaction between the royal cousins is so different). ( )

Being familiar with the story of the Prisoner of Zenda, when I picked this tale up in my teens, I thought it was a copy of that work. Little did I know that Hope's Zenda was copied in many places. Jack Lemmon and Flashie both live Ruritanian Romances and so wanting to research for a project I recently returned to this tale. Now available through the courtesy of Project Gutenberg for free.

We have our hero, visiting the land of his ancestors and finding that there are a great many evil machinations going on. But he is instantly caught up with a princess and falls for her so quick that this becomes the theme of the story. Even when we have the Austrians and Serbians poised against each other a in the entire last half of the book, the romance of our hero and the princess seems to me to eclipse the rest.

But no moment passes without action, including his escape from a firing squad. That the king he needs to impersonate in not only a coward but vindictive as well shows that our hero is the best of all choices for anything and that there is little need for him to even think of a role as Sydney Carton.

I think that there should be a renaissance of Ruritanian Romances now. The Mad King is a great place to start after you have done the Prisoner of Zenda. Well worth a read and then a reread some few years later. ( )

Being familiar with the story of the Prisoner of Zenda, when I picked this tale up in my teens, I thought it was a copy of that work. Little did I know that Hope's Zenda was copied in many places. Jack Lemmon and Flashie both live Ruritanian Romances and so wanting to research for a project I recently returned to this tale. Now available through the courtesy of Project Gutenberg for free.

We have our hero, visiting the land of his ancestors and finding that there are a great many evil machinations going on. But he is instantly caught up with a princess and falls for her so quick that this becomes the theme of the story. Even when we have the Austrians and Serbians poised against each other a in the entire last half of the book, the romance of our hero and the princess seems to me to eclipse the rest.

But no moment passes without action, including his escape from a firing squad. That the king he needs to impersonate in not only a coward but vindictive as well shows that our hero is the best of all choices for anything and that there is little need for him to even think of a role as Sydney Carton.

I think that there should be a renaissance of Ruritanian Romances now. The Mad King is a great place to start after you have done the Prisoner of Zenda. Well worth a read and then a reread some few years later. ( )

Nice easy read ( )