#book request

I got reminded of a book I really liked, but I can't remember the identifying information: author or title...

This week there was a Tumblr post running around about a kingdom at war, and the prince comes out to the front lines for a war council. He's wise and excellent at strategy. Sometimes prince needs a cane, crutches or a wheelchair.

A general sees Prince in a wheelchair, starts declaring loudly that living with a disability is a fate worse than death, unmanly, yadda yadda. So his aide asks, sir if you're ever wounded what would be your wishes?

General says, it is your duty to give me the mercy tap. (Which, boggle)

It's by way of this that the general gets the nickname, the warhorse of (hometown), not because warhorses are noble and brave, but because they're so fragile that you have to put them down because they've broken a leg.

***

This reminded me of the book I can almost remember, which is a M/M romance, where the young prince is a bit foppish, "unmasculine" for his love of beautiful clothes, and who is unabashedly queer and has also declared multiple times his admiration for the general/warlord. (He's also iirc an unreliable narrator because I think we see the General Looking Respectfully 👀👀👀)

Foppish Prince manages to save his people in the ...Summer Palace, I think, when the bandits come, gets them all out safe and joins up with the forces of the General/Warlord.

It's not fanfiction, I'm pretty sure. And I've been reading tons of @luninosity and @sweetfirebird (whose books I have I need to go check through)...

Things akin to Howl’s Moving Castle, Stardust, The Princess Bride, etc?

I’m particularly looking for audiobook recommendations so if you know one that plays really well as audio, I’d love the suggestions!

The Parasol Protectorate and Finishing School series by Gail Carriger are really good, I think they have some of the most interesting takes on transformation and pack dynamics. But I finished the first, am almost finished with the second, and my local library doesn’t have much of the other related series.

I've recently really enjoyed Chosen Ones by Veronica Roth which is written as a diary interspersed with offical goverment docs/memos; the Six Stories series by Matt Wesolowski which are written as podcast transcripts, and The Appeal and The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett, which are emails/text chats and voice memo transcripts respectively.

I'd love to read more books like those if anyone has any recommendations?

I'm trying to find something a little longer for her to read, to encourage her to make the jump from "book I can read in one sitting" to "book I can read over the course of a week." Thus far any book we've tried like that she decides is boring after she's read it for a little while, and will set it down to reread one of her other books.

So, the criteria basically are that it's a book that's long enough to take multiple sittings to read, and it's either funny or action-packed or both (she likes humor, natural disaster survival drama, mysteries, possibly ghost stories but only if scooby-doo levels of scary). It can be at a higher than 4th grade reading level, but the plot maturity level still should be appropriate for a 9yo. She still has trouble understanding some of the social drama in babysitter's club, so anything YA or targeted at teens is likely to be too mature for her (idk if libraries are uniform on this but I'm looking for something that would be in the J Fiction section in our local one).