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| Photo from GoodReads.com |
About the Book:
Dear Reader,My name is Luke Edgewood, and there are few things in life that I require. Mainly black coffee. And flannel. And lots of solitude. And my dogs, Chewy and Indie. What I don’t need is romance, so I have no plans to change my thirty-year-old bachelor status anytime soon.
But my youngest sister thinks that by accepting a short-term construction job in the small European country of Skymar, I’m going to follow along in her footsteps and discover my own romantic adventure. Nope. Bah humbug. The End. This time, her rom-com-movie senses are totally wrong.
Or maybe not. Because I’ve met a Grace Kelly look-alike who is annoying . . . until she isn’t. But she is impossible. As in, nothing can happen between us because she is a literal princess. Even though that’s easy to forget when we’re working together to restore a castle-like orphanage in a secluded mountain town and “forced proximity” includes a small closet, a secret one-hundred-year-old journal, and the tactile memory of an off-limits royal in my arms.
Basically, the whole situation has turned into an ooey gooey magical snow globe of romantic tropes complete with cute kids and an actual ball. Now, even my sentences are starting to sound like mush. Ugh. Send high levels of testosterone my way—I’m going to need it.
Loyally,
Review:
Luke is a fun, slightly gruff, cinnamon roll of a character, who steals the show. His love interest, Ellie, (also known as Princess Elliana) has layers and some fun aspects to her personality as well, however, I struggled to get into the princess/commoner trope, probably since it's been done so often. It rarely seems to happen in real life, so the abundance of books with this trope seems a bit overdone.
Loyally, Luke is filled with other such tropes, which are meant to be obvious, since gruff Luke has a thing about tropes... and romance, in general. However, I just couldn't appreciate the irony of them-- probably because I share some of Luke's sarcastic romantic sensibilities. Out of all the characters, I felt I related the most to Luke, which made his POV the most interesting and fun for me.
I also think that I might have appreciated the storyline, tropes and all, if I had read the first two books (I guess this is a series? Even though it's not technically listed as one, as far as I can see). As it was, I didn't feel that I could fully appreciate the characters like I wanted to. Izzy and Penelope, Luke's sisters, appear in the story mainly in text-chat form, which was a fun element to the story and I think really adds to the interest. However, since I never got to "meet" them in books one and two, I felt like I was being introduced into a fun family dynamic that I really wanted to engage with, but since I didn't know who anyone was, I was just trying to hang on and figure out who the heck everyone was and how they were all related.
If you like cute Hallmark movies and fun rom-coms, this might just be the book for you. I'm now thinking of going back and reading books 1 and 2 so I can reevaluate and, hopefully, fully appreciate the story.
![About [span]me[/span]](https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/21317951_428793254184642_8407368185998172738_n.jpg?_nc_cat=0&oh=af697a8036e92d5bacac66a7d2da5045&oe=5C382B7B)
