From strip clubs and truck stops to southern coast mansions and prep schools, one girl tries to stay true to herself.Review:
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.
Ella hasn't had the easiest of lives, and the past year has been one of the worst. After losing her mom to cancer, moving cross-country, and restoring to questionable ways to make a living, Ella is just hoping she can survive until high school graduation. Ella just knows everything will be better if she has her high school diploma. At least then she has a shot at becoming someone with no worries. Everything changes, however, the moment Callum Royal walks into her life. An old friend of father's, Callum has become guardian of Ella. Ella is reluctant, but Callum strikes a deal: $10,000 dollars a month for every month she stays with him. Ella knows can't pass up a deal like that - it can pay for college!- so off she goes to the South with Callum, ready to get through the next two years as quickly as possible. The only problem? His five incredibly attractive but also incredibly protective sons want nothing more then to see Ella leave.
Ella is the stereotypical NA protagonist. She's had a hard life whilst holding on to just a tad bit of innocence and then she's thrown into a new life of riches. Ella wasn't the most deep or well developed of characters, but I still enjoyed reading her story. I found her POV to be interesting, and I enjoyed seeing her friendships with the boys as well as the girls at school grow and develop. I think one of my favorite parts of the book was her friendship with Val. Val was such a cool girl, and I'm really hoping one of these sequels will involve her story at some point. I had a love-hate relationship with the Royal boys in this. I couldn't believe how hard and nasty they were towards Ella - it was just horrible! But they all did begin to grow on me by the end. My feelings towards Reed, the love interest in this, were hot and cold. He's one of those typical bad boys who does horrible things but secretly deep down has some niceness to him. He did a lot of cruel, horrible things to Ella in the start, and while he did try to explain throughout why he was so cold, I was sometimes surprised to see how Ella forgave him so easily.
The plot in this was the typical rags-to-riches with some romance thrown in, and as I'm a sucker for those kind of books, I tore through this one easily. I really enjoyed the sub-plot involving Ella's dad. The authors managed to throw in some good twists, that really had me on the edge of my seat at times. I'm interested to see if more will be revealed about Ella's dad, stepmom, and the will in the next book. I feel like the stepmom isn't about to give up too easily... The romance in this was steamy with a capital S, and while I didn't always approve of Reed, watching Reed and Ella turn from enemies into friends and then something more was one of my favorite parts of the book.
Perfect for fans of Abbi Glines, Paper Princess reads like your favorite celebrity tabloid...a guilty pleasure that you can't put down! And with a cliffhanger as crazy as Paper Princess's was, I can't wait to read the next books.
Grade: B+
Source: Library
I've had this one on my TBR list for quite a while, I'm glad to see that you enjoyed it! I've seen some mixed reviews for it but I still definitely want to give it a try. Great review!
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