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venerdì 9 aprile 2021

Review: Paper Princess (The Royals #1) by Erin Watt

Paper Princess
The Royals #1

Author: Erin watt
Published: April 4th 2016
Publisher: Timeout LLC
Number of pages: 370
Format: eBook
Source: Bought
PurchaseAmazonB&NTBD

From Goodreads:
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. 

My Review

Where do I even start with this book? I had been warned. I knew that this was going to be a strange, disturbing yet addictive path to follow. And despite every warning, I kept reading.

Paper Princess starts with the introduction of our protagonist Ella, a 17yo girl who’s alone in the world and who tries to mantain her indipendence by doing all kind of works, even those that a girl her age should not even consider doing. I liked the idea of having a young yet strong female protagonist, as I usually struggle when the narration is led by immature characters and I have to say that for great part of the book I enjoyed how Ella managed to stay strong despite everything she was forced to face. She was the perfect mix of humour and wittiness, despite also showing at times her suffering and therefore her young age. But when the Royals start to get involed, I admit that I expected Ella to be a little more tough than what she then shows. I think that for a girl with such past, she was fooled too easily by the sick, corrupted world of the Royals and I really hoped that she would have defied all clichèes and end up resisting them. Well, she didn’t.

Apparently nobody can because The Royals, are just unimaginable things. When they appeared on those stairs, all five of them, I knew that they were going to be actively implied in Ella’s future but I could never imagine how or how many of them.

This book has a way of treating sex and boundaries in a most disturbing yet addictive way. I was shocked while skimming through the pages by the amount of taboos brought up and completely brushed aside, like brothers getting horny for their “sister” or their father screwing his girlfriend a mere inch away from Ella. I think I made the most hilarious faces while reading some of these passages, that I wish I had filmed me. Like when this whole insane scenario just reached a peak and Ella gets drugged, her heroic brothers just kept repeating – like in a serious tone – that the only way to make her feel better was to give her RELIEF, as if fucking is actually considered as a medical prescription for coming out of the high! And how passionate those souls were to offer themselves in sacrifice! I’m not gonna lie and tell you that some parts of the book were quite hot to read, but still, they were mostly uncomfortable and sometimes so absurd that I just wanted to roll my eyes and shut the book. Another annoying thing regarded how the brothers initially slut-shamed and tortured Ella by hinting at how they could do to her whatever they liked, rape being very close to their behaviour, that was supposed to be accepted just for how hot they were portrayed. I have not felt insulted by the superficiality of this story, but I understand how these scenes could be very triggering for someone who might have lived difficult situations.

Sex being obviously a central topic to this story, I have to say that there were also other types of relationships developed, like Ella’s bond with Eaton or with Valerie, both good examples of friendships that helped in actually adding on to the plot, that if it wasn’t for the spicy bits, wasn’t that much complex.

The worst thing about this book though, is that even if you know that it is really disturbed, so disturbed that you should probably end it, you just end up getting sucked in its toxicity, just like Ella. I’m not gonna lie, I’m going to buy book #2, first because I know that we have probably seen the worst of the family and we can only have the better left, and secondly because it ended with a cliffhanger that, even if it was not totally unexpected, made me curious about what will come up next in Broken Prince. What can I say? I’m just human!

Rated 3.5

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