I had this series for many weeks on my reading list, but never took the time to actually get them. Not to mention reading. Until recently. And despite the fact, that I don´t understand what the hysteria about this first part is all about, I read the first three books in one single swoop. Don´t let yourself get fooled by the looks of the covers. There isn´t one cheesy line here. Okay, you might want to argue about the main characters and how they are created, but that´s about it. And don´t expect Ella to be a nice and sweet princess. She is way more than only a fantastic looking girl.
Paper Princess*
by Erin WattThe Royals Series #1
Publisher Everafter Romance on April 4, 2016
Genre Novel
Pages 364
Format Softcover
✶✶✶½
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 watch her. He says she doesn´t belong with the Royals. He might be right.
Story
Ella is used to be in control of her own life. She never had a parent who told her how to behave, what to do, and when or who told her a simple no, not going to happen. Her mother was always busy to earn enough money to keep them both above the waterline and Ella spent most of her life alone, waiting for her to come home. And when cancer became a part of their lives, it was Ella, who took care of them both. But one day a guardian in the form of mega-rich Callum Royal steps into her life and changes everything.
Style
The language is simple and the plot not new. And yet, the world is making a huge fuss about it. The cover and the story are two different things. There is nothing sweet or playful in this novel, and the main figure Ella isn´t at all the sweet and easy to handle girl you might expect from such a novel. Hate, drugs, alcohol, sex, intrigues, and many other things bring this novel alive and show you how hard and mean life during Highschool can be. Especially when you aren´t rich and your mother was a stripper. No one of the new classmates is asking if it is true, that Ella herself was a stripper as well or if she´s done all the things people say about her.
Characters
Ella and the five Royal boys are anything but ordinary. The boys are totally fucked up and even though they are handsome as hell and know it, they live as if there wouldn´t be any tomorrow. And as long as they have money in their pockets, they don´t even care where it comes from. When you have a sick mother at home and are responsible for a lot of bills, you can´t be very picky about how you will earn money. Ella chose to have three jobs and one of them was being a stripper herself. That way she could make more money than with her two other jobs altogether and live an independent life. A tricky game that wasn´t supposed to last long.
What I liked about Ella was that she was always taking care of herself. Even when she had to go with Callum and got a lot of money all of a sudden. She looked for a new job and didn´t take anything her new guardian provided for granted. Nature gave her great looks, she was and still is very wary, fierce, and sees right through the rich and glamorous style the Royal family has.
Conclusion
Good, I admit it, this first book of the famous The Royals series wasn´t really mine. Too many stereotypes, too predictable in some ways and not really new with all the Highschool drama going on. But for whatever reason, I wanted to know how the story would go on and thankfully the next book was already waiting on my shelf. But judge for yourself.
Happy reading
*I read the German edition new release by Piper on March 1, 2017
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