Synopsis:
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:
This place is like the Garden of Eden. Beautiful but full of danger.
There was SO much to love about this book! Ella, the feisty, smart and sarcastic survivor. The sex, lust, and dirty talk. The fast-moving storyline. I really liked this book a lot but the over-the-top teen drama, the cruelty and the unecessary theatrics got in the way from making this a homerun for me.
Elle Kennedy and Jen Frederick (the pair behind Erin Watt) are amazingly talented and gifted writers. Their writing talent made this book a TOTAL guilty pleasure, with a very likeable and resilient heroine and TONS of hot and heavy lust and sex. Ella Harper finds herself suddenly living in a world of almost unimaginable wealth and privilege after Callum Royal, her father’s old friend, becomes her legal guardian. She is a poor girl who did what she had to support herself and get through high school. Suddenly, she is enrolled in private school and living in a house filled with Callum’s sons, who are resentful of her, to say the least. They are on a mission to destroy her, and to make her leave. Despite their taunts and their endless bullying, she refuses to leave and is only after one thing: to finish high school and go to college.
“You should get away from here. These Royals will ruin you.”
Oh but there’s the little detail of Reed Royal. The meanest of them all (and that’s saying a lot), he and Ella hate each other at first sight but then can’t stay away from each other. Even though I disliked Reed at the beginning, he began to grow on me and I could see how Ella eventually found him irresistible:
“He has everything a girl could want: the hard body, the handsome face that will still look good years from now, the money, and that extra something. Charisma, I guess. The ability to slay you with a single look. The apple is dangling in front of me, juicy red and delicious, but, like the fairy tale, Reed Royal is the villain disguised as a pretty prince. Taking a bite out of him would be a huge mistake.”
The Royals run the school and everyone there follows their orders. This book reminded me a lot of Beverly Hills 90210 and Gossip Girl. There is no question that this story is unputdownable. I just would have liked less cruelty and a little more reality. Nonetheless, I will most DEFINITELY read the next book because this one ends on quite the cliffhanger! I really do want to see what is next for Ella Harper.
“Auden wrote that when the boy falls from the sky after calamity after calamity, he still has a future somewhere and that there’s no point in dwelling on one’s loss. But did he suffer this? Would he have written that if he had lived my life?”
(ARC provided by the authors in return for an honest review.)