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My Review:Title: A Royal Christmas Princess
Author: Scarlet Wilson
Published by: Tule Publishing
Release Date: October 11th 2016
Format: Kindle Book
Pages: 158
Genres: Romance, Contemporary, Holiday
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2019 Beat the Backlist Challenge, Lenoreo's COYER With Friends
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks
My rating:
Blurb:After a tough year losing her mom and bills mounting, Holly Yates is in for a lonely Christmas. But when she hears a news report that the small principality of Coronia is looking for their lost princess, Holly is astounded to recognize the baby photo. It’s her!
Felix, also a Coronia royal, whisks Holly into her very own fairy-tale including a castle nestled within the quaint snow-covered Coronia capitol and her biological father, eager to meet his daughter. With Felix by her side as she meets the people of her would-be kingdom and prepares to attend a ball in her honor, Holly begins to fall in love, not just with Coronia, but also with the would-be prince.
Will the handsome prince still be at the side of this unexpected fairy-tale princess when the clock strikes midnight?
3.5 stars — Did you ever notice that it’s easier somehow when a book is just solidly meh? This was not that book. This book had meh moments interspersed with delicious Hallmark Christmas movie feels, and so it makes for kind of a hard review to write…and hard to decide on a rating. In the end I really enjoyed myself though, so I’ll give it a half star fist bump.
It’s hard to quantify what I liked and didn’t like. The characters were pretty one-dimensional…or actually, like two-dimensional. Like, they weren’t full three-dimensional, but they weren’t completely flat. They were kind of endearing, and they made me feel exactly like I do about the characters in those cheesy Christmas movies. They’re easy to like (or hate in the case of the villains), but they’re almost a bit too good to be true, you know? Like Holly was unbearably caring and thoughtful and self-sacrificing. Believable? Mostly, but not completely. And Felix was sweet and understanding, making some swoony moves…but the parts where he interacts with Cass made me confused about him.
As for the story? It both gave me Christmas magic, and felt completely formulaic…like I practically see the author checking off a checklist of a Christmas romance. I don’t always mind that though, and I could live with it in this one. It gave me what I was looking for.
The part that has me rounding down instead of up is that the book felt like it needed another editing pass. I’m willing to give Indie books a bit more of a pass on that, but this one had a publisher, so I really don’t understand why it felt a bit sloppy. I noticed timeline inconsistencies, at one point Prince Alfred became Albert, and the writing just in general felt clunky in parts. If I’d been reading an ARC I might have understood it, but not in the final published copy. It was a bit disappointing.
So yeah. If you want a Christmas book that will give you that perfect formula like a Hallmark movie, I’d say give this one a shot. But I’d also wait for a sale given the quality issues.
I feel like I should both tell you that I’m happy you had those Hallmark moments and that it sucks that it was just meh.