Buy Links: Amazon
I would
- Befriend: Ella
- Go out on a date & kiss: Easton.
- Take to a desert island and leave behind: Brooke
- Travel to Vegas and let Elvis Presley marry us: Easton and Reed because I can't choose between them yet.
If I turned on the TV, I'd find Ella, the Royal Boys and their friends on:
5 “Addictive & Hot & Perfect & I'm so in love” STARS
I have to say that after I read “A
Court of Mist and Fury”, I thought I wouldn’t read another 5-star book this
year. And that was true for a while – until this week’s “Top Five Wednesday” happened.
The theme for the week was “Books
you want to read before the end of 2016” and “Paper Princess” was one of my top
picks for that list. That was when I thought, “You know what? I’m having an
okay-ish reading week and I need something really good”. This book was supposed
to be really good, and then I bought it and guess what? It’s more than just
good.
It’s perfect. It’s everything I
wanted and more.
The main reason for that:
Ella-freaking-Harper, my new book crush and best friend and the strong, funny
and witty person I wish I was.
I’m so in love with Ella that it’s
not even funny.
Here you have a seventeen-year-old
who’s been working as a stripper, a waitress and anything she can find since
she was fifteen to have enough to buy food, pay for a roof over her head and
pay for her mother’s cancer treatment. Before that, she had to deal with her
mom’s crappy boyfriends and the fact that they had to move around every time
her mom got in trouble or lost her job. This is a girl who lost her mom to
cancer recently and is once again moving from town to town with one focus:
graduate high school, go to college and find a good job. She’s not messing
around, she’s not getting distracted by boys or gossip or anything else – she’s
sacrificing her youth and her innocence because she wants a better future. Do I
love her yet? Yep! Yep! Freaking yep!
Then, she learns her father (a man
she never met) was a super-rich dude with a super-rich best friend who builds
freaking airplanes. We’re talking multimillionaire here, and this father died
leaving his best friend, Mr. Royal in charge of the daughter he never met.
So one day Ella is stripping for
food, and the next she’s getting rushed into a private jet to fly to a mansion
(or a palace, from the description) to live with Mr. Royal and his five hot, rich
and jerk sons. Why did Ella go? Because she’s smart. Mr. Royal (whom I love
despite his many flaws, by the way) offers Ella 10 thousand dollars at the end
of each month if she doesn’t run away. Being one of the smartest MC’s I’ve ever
read, Ella sees this as the golden opportunity it is: she’ll have cash and the
chance to have the academic life she’d always dreamed of.
Of course things aren’t perfect –
Ella doesn’t believe in perfect, which also makes me love her. The Royal boys
hate her and want her gone. Reed Royal, the leader of the brothers, hates her
even more. Everyone is the preppy school (think Gossip Girl, but a little
worse) she goes to hates her because they do whatever the Royal boys want them
to. But Ella doesn’t give a crap about it (can you feel my love growing?).
When they threaten her, she
threatens back. When they strike, she strikes twice as hard. When they tease
her, she has an epic comeback. Do you want examples?
When Reed Royal, being the jackass
he is, calls her mother a prostitute:
“Screw you, Royal. She was not a prostitute, unless
dancing is your version of sex and if so, your sex life must suck”. I meet Reed’s
hard eyes with defiant ones. “Do you worst. You’re an amateur compared to what
I’ve been through.”
Then when the school’s queen Bee tries
to shame her asking how does it feel to suck old man cock to get where she was:
I blink, pasting on an indifferent expression. “Your
dad’s not bad, if that’s what you’re asking, but I find it super creepy that he
wants to pull my hair and have me call him Daddy. Is everything okay at home?”
When queen Bee doesn’t give up and
fills her locker with trash:
I pause in front of Jordan, one eyebrow arched, my own
smirk forming on my lips. “Is that all you’ve got, Carrington? I’m trash?
Tsk-tsk. I’m disappointed in your lack of creativity.”
And these are just three of the
examples of how awesome and badass and perfect Ella Harper is. I won’t give
more because you need to read it and fall in love with her yourself.
What really got me was that Ella
didn’t let them see how broken she was inside and how much all of that crap
hurt her – because it did hurt her. And the fact that she was hurt made her
human and likable, and that she fought back made her special and badass.
Perfection.
Her humanity and her vulnerability were
even more pronounced when she was dealing with the Royals.
I love everything about her relationship
with Mr. Royal – from the way she tried to antagonize him at first because she
didn’t know she could trust him, to how they developed some sort of friendship
to how she began to see him as a father figure.
She had a similar storyline with
Easton – one of the Royal boys. Easton was a big jerk at first, but he was the
first of the brothers to warm up to Ella and OMG, I loved Easton so much. I
think I loved him more than I did Reed because I saw a vulnerability in him
that I didn’t see in the leader of the group.
Easton went from Ella’s enemy to her
fling (that dancing + kissing + making out scene was HOOOOOOOOOTTTTTTTTTTT) to
her first ally in the house to her big brother. It was messed up, disturbing at
times, complicated and adorable. When he started calling her little sis I swooned.
Hard. They were so freaking adorable!
But Ella’s worst tormentor in the beginning
wasn’t Easton; it was Reed – the alpha boy, the leader, the one every other
brother and all their friends looked at for directions. He was the biggest jerk
ever and the hottest guy Ella had ever seen, and her body reacted to him in a
way her mind despised. Ella tried to ignore her attraction to him, which was
kind of easy since he pretty much did anything he could to make her leave, but
attraction is attraction, and in a book co-written by freaking Elle Kennedy,
attraction is something that drifts off the pages, holds you by the neck and
makes breathing impossible.
This book was freaking hot. Ella and
Reed were freaking hot, hot, so damn hot I might have burns all over my body
just from reading this.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not
sure Reed will be able to redeem himself after the stunt he pulled in the end
(YES, CLIFFHANGER ENDING, BABY!), but I can’t deny he’s sexy AF.
For now, let’s just say my favorite
Royal boy is Easton and the judge is still out on whether I’ll be able to
forgive Reed or not. But since I can’t see Ella in a romantic relationship with
Easton anymore, and Reed is a super alpha-male from the Jericho Barrons-kind of
school, then my weak heart might find give in in the end.
Plus, Ella and Reed have a variation
of a Blair and Chuck relationship, and I was a fan.
Last thing… If you think this book
is all about the Royal boys, you’re wrong. Sure they’re everyone – we’re
talking about five of them + Mr. Royal – but there are great girls in this book
as well. Jordan, as you already know, is a bitch, but Ella found in Valerie –
Jordan’s cousin – and Savannah girls she could trust. I LOVED Valerie because
she was the opposite of everything I thought she’d be, and Savannah grew on me
toward the end.
I can’t wait to see more about these
girl’s friendship – although I’m not sure how that’s going to go after that
ending.
That freaking ending that almost
ripped my heart out.
Okay, so now that I wrote a
four-freaking-page review, I’m done. But I’m not done with the series because I’m
most definitely spending more money on these books. I need the second book
RIGHT NOW! You’ll hear back from me on the awesomeness that is Ella Parker and
the Royal boys sooner rather than later.
*If you liked this review (or not), if you read the book (or not), come say hello and leave your comments bellow.
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