So, literally the second I finished Paper Princess I bought Broken Prince. After *that* ending, I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next. I was also intrigued because I knew Broken Prince would be a dual-viewpoint novel.
I wasn’t disappointed. The action picks up just before Paper Princess finished - just before Ella walked in to see Reed in bed with Brooke. Ew. So yeah, there’s that and the fall-out from Ella discovering that her maybe-boyfriend is hooking up with his dad’s girlfriend.
The whole books is like ‘some kind of misunderstanding’ world, with a detour through ‘I have to keep secrets from you for your own good’. It had me absolutely hooked from the first page to the final page. And what an ending! It had me open-mouthed with shock-horror and I immediately downloaded the third book in the series.
I just don’t know why I loved this book (and its predecessor) so much, but I did. It has everything I usually hate about books (alpha males, token mean girls, no diversity, a load of rich people being mean to each other and whining about their first-world problems) but I still lapped it up. And I’m not even the sort of person that likes soap operas (because this was massively like a soap opera).
The only thing I can put it down to is the characterisation. Don’t get me wrong: the characters aren’t particularly nice, but they don’t half jump off the page at you. And even though their faults are legion, the Royal boys try so hard to keep their fragile family together that you just can’t help liking them. They don’t exactly learn and grow as the story progresses, which would usually be a problem, but this book has the ability to turn off all rational thought in my head. I just had to keep reading the pages.
Brooke gets even more poisonous in this book, which is kind of fun and only narrowly escape crossing the line into Pantomime Villain. Her whole storyline is pretty icky in this book and the way everything ends up is pretty screwy. It takes a massive suspension of disbelief, but there’s something in the writing that allows you to turn off your Reality Checker and just go with the flow.
So, I’m reading the last book now. It’s just as crazy as the previous two and just as improbable and I’m loving it just as much. I guess I’ll never really be able to explain coherently why I like this series so much. There’s so much to dislike, but I just can’t seem to stop myself.
5 stars