I was lucky enough to win Paper Princess by Erin Watt via a giveaway at Goodreads. I try to remember to enter the giveaways there, as sometimes it pays off! I really liked this book too! I suppose it is meant to be read by young adults, but it worked perfectly for me as well.
“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 is a strong protagonist who knows how to take care of herself and is reluctant to let Callum Royal care for her as her guardian. He promises her a great deal of money if she lives with the family and sticks it out at her new school, which is full of nasty rich kids. I appreciated that Callum and Ella truly developed a father / daughter relationship and nothing further. However, Callum’s five sons are a different story. Although the joke about Ella being their sister, she obviously is not, and as they slowly go from hating her presence to tolerating her to caring for her, her relationships with each brother is a story in itself. The back stories are meaningful and the writer (actually writers, as the book is a collaboration between two authors) makes every scene vivid enough to imagine.
This book has that awful thing at the end known as a cliffhanger. But I am happy to discover that the second book comes out in July! I’m looking forward to reading what happens next for the Royals and Ella.
What have you been reading lately?