I’m finally done with this series by Katharine McGee!
I’m honestly not even sure why I kept up with it so long. When explaining it to my dad, I called it a soap opera and then realized that two different people ended up in a coma and another faked a pregnancy at different points in this series, so, yeah, soap opera pretty well covers it.
I was relieved when I realized this was the end of the series because it’s like a train wreck. It’s not good, but I just couldn’t stop watching — or reading in this case.
The finale was as ridiculous and bingeable as the other three books in the series. This review has all the spoilers, so consider yourself warned.
It starts about three months after the last book ended. Jefferson is realizing how hard it is to rule, Samantha is in Hawaii with her duke, hiding from the world and totally unaware that Beatrice is in a coma. Beatrice, btw, is finally waking up, but has lost her memories of most of the past year. She doesn’t remember her dad dying, and although she knows who Teddy is, she doesn’t remember falling in love with him. She still thinks she’s in love with Connor.
So just coming to terms with all that is bad enough, but on top of it all, one of the dukes finds out (or suspects) she’s suffered memory loss, and is trying to convince Congress to declare her mentally unfit to rule. So she’s trying to hide from the public that she’s lost so much time, but they still have her give a press briefing without a script, which is such a colossally stupid decision that everyone involved should have been fired.
Samantha finally checks her messages and rushes home, but it’s too late. She gets there just as Beatrice is waking up, Jefferson is furious at her for leaving him in the lurch, and Congress has stripped her of her royal titles and allowance. She’s forced to live on her own.
In the kind of good luck that only happens in soap operas, she just happens to know one of the palace workers, who just happens to have a room opening up in his house. He and all his housemates just happen to work at the same bar, which just happens to have an opening for a waitress on the night Samantha shows up, and Samantha just happens to be really good at waitressing despite having zero experience with anything even remotely like it.
That said, it was kind of cool to watch a princess learn to navigate the real world and get excited about things like taking the subway.
Daphne has her prince, and when they go to the doctor, of course there’s no baby. She’s afraid Jefferson will be pissed, but the doctor assumes she just made a mistake and Jefferson is more concerned with how she feels than considering the possibility that she intentionally lied to him.
Honestly, I kind of thought it would turn out she was pregnant for real. What a twist that would have been!
Fortunately for Daphne, her gamble still paid off because they’ve already announced the engagement, and Jefferson feels like he can’t back out now.
But someone is threatening Daphne and trying to get her to break off the engagement. They claim to know what she’s done and are threatening to make it public.
Because she assumes they mean sleeping with Ethan (who’s now back in the country) she has to team up with him to track down whoever it is and put a stop to it so she can have the perfect royal wedding she’s worked for her whole life. But of course spending time together brings up all the feelings she’s been trying so hard to bury.
I’m glad Daphne and Jefferson didn’t end up together and that they both reached that conclusion at the same time. I’m also glad Jefferson and Nina didn’t end up together, although I was surprised by how quickly she started flirting with another dude. She went through three men in what? A little over a year?
I also found it funny that the narrator gave the Canadian prince a Canadian accent only after it was revealed he was Canadian and it was specified that Nina couldn’t place his accent because he had spent some time studying all over the world. For the most part, I thought the narrator did a really good job, but that mistake was too funny for me to miss.