I was given the ARC of this book at the Texas Library Association Conference by the publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers and the finished edition will be released on May 1st.
Royals is the story of Daisy Winters, little sister to the future queen of Scotland. Daisy is an American, born and raised in a fairly normal household in Florida. Her sister goes off to college and manages to land the prince of Scotland, the future king. Now that they are engaged, Daisy must give up her summer plans with her best friend to go to Scotland and try to win over the royal family with her charm and wit. Disaster ensues, chaos, etc.
Okay first off, I knew immediately that this was a sort of Princess Diaries tale because there is no royal family of Scotland and so it is a warped sense of realistic and historical fiction. That being said, I did take this to be a light-hearted contemporary book, and not something where the author was just trying to give us a warped sense of Scotland or trying to pass off false facts as truth. There are so many reviews of this book where the reviewer thought that it was embarrassing for the real Scotland, but I just viewed this as a book written from the point of view of an American and the facts and history that we are fed here through pop culture.
This did take me back to the days when I read The Princess Diaries book because like those, the main character does not fit into the royal life very well, she is strong, independent, quirky and funny. I enjoyed this book for the humor and the nostalgia throughout the story. Daisy is a memorable character who gave me some laugh-out-loud moments like when she is at a very fancy horse race where everyone has those big fancy hats on, and this woman is sneering at her because she is a common American, and Daisy compares her hat to Big Bird’s butt. The romance aspect to this book is cute and very PG. The ending is wrapped up very nice which is a relief, and I didn’t feel that it was dragged out.
Overall, I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars, because it was great but not one of my absolute favorite novels of all time and because of the skewed view of Scotland throughout the novel. I do recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books with royalty or who loved The Princess Diaries.
Here is the link on Amazon to Pre-order this novel:
