Monday 29 August 2016

Paper Princess (The Royals #1) by Emma Watt

28678119Format: Kindle Edition
Print Length: 370 pages


Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
ASIN: B01DT9ZWNI
 

From strip clubs and truck stops to southern coast mansions and prep schools, one girl tries to stay true to herself.

These Royals will ruin you…

Ella Harper is a survivor—a pragmatic optimist. She’s spent her whole life moving from town to town with her flighty mother, struggling to make ends meet and believing that someday she’ll climb out of the gutter. After her mother’s death, Ella is truly alone. 

Until Callum Royal appears, plucking Ella out of poverty and tossing her into his posh mansion among his five sons who all hate her. Each Royal boy is more magnetic than the last, but none as captivating as Reed Royal, the boy who is determined to send her back to the slums she came from.

Reed doesn’t want her. He says she doesn’t belong with the Royals.

He might be right.

Wealth. Excess. Deception. It’s like nothing Ella has ever experienced, and if she’s going to survive her time in the Royal palace, she’ll need to learn to issue her own Royal decrees. 

Cover:  I really like this cover.  I think it's really quite pretty and it drew me in.

I hadn't really heard of this book, but I saw a beautiful post on Instagram and the cover intrigued me. I of course looked up the synopsis on Goodreads and the tagline 'this generation's Cruel Intentions' really  hooked me in.

And this was a bit of an odd read for me, because it kept me turning pages, I didn’t want to put it down, but at the same time I was never really 100% sure I liked what I was reading.  But something drew me in.

Ella has had a tough life.  I really liked her character- she had a lot of courage and spunk.  She helped her Mum through her terminal illness, and since she passed away, she’s struggled to support herself through school.  And she’s done it by working multiple jobs…one of which is a stripper.

Until Calum Royal shows up out of the blue claiming to be her guardian.  And whisks her off to his giant mansion and offers to put her through an elite prep school, shopping trips, a car…but she has to put up with his five sons, who have made it very clear to her that they don’t want her there.

An interesting relationship develops between Ella and the Royal brothers.  It starts off rocky, but eventually a sort of friendship starts with some of them, but there seems to be an odd connection between her and Reed. 

I wasn’t sure if I was enjoying it, because the rich lifestyle and they’re spoilt behaviour, and it’s pretty messed up. I couldn’t understand Calum- and his grief over his wife’s death and yet I couldn’t reconcile his behaviour with someone that was upset and supposedly loved their wife enough to never have cheated on them.  Getting with someone (and not a nice someone) 6 months after her death.  No wonder his kids are messed up- undercover fights, pain killer addiction, threesomes, sharing a girlfriend.

I liked Ella, but I struggled to see how the attraction to Reed started.  I mean he was awful in the beginning – and she’d been so strong and independent, particularly with the snobs at school.

Towards the end I started to warm to Reed, albeit reluctantly.

But the end of this book, with its massive cliff hanger, had that come crashing down, but I think there’s more to that than initially meets the eye.

Rating was hard, because I was engrossed but not always entirely comfortable.

3.5/5 stars.
And I will be picking up the sequel because of that cliffhanger.


No comments:

Post a Comment