An Island Princess Starts a Scandal

Adriana Herrera's An Island Princess Starts a Scandal (2023) is the second novel in the Las Leonas series, a historical romance set during the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Manuela del Carmen Caceres Galvan, a painter from the Caribbean, is invited to exhibit her work at the World's Fair — and, with a loveless arranged marriage waiting for her at home, she resolves to spend one last summer of freedom in the city with her two closest friends.

Cora Kempf Bristol, Duchess of Sundridge, is known for her ruthlessness in business. What she chases is not money but power, and she sees an opening in a parcel of land Manuela has sworn never to sell. The bargain the two women strike — the land in exchange for the duchess's patronage and company through the season — becomes something neither of them planned for, drawing them through the bohemian art world of the Exposition and the queer communities that gathered around it.

Herrera writes the period with detailed historical research and an unabashedly feminist eye, and the romance is explicit. The novel was a USA Today bestseller and appeared on the Chicago Public Library's list of must-read romances of 2023.