Royal Pain - Book Review

By Tracy Wolff

Synopsis

Being rich opens a lot of doors. When you’re rich and royal, those doors lead to a new bedroom every night. I should know. The tabloids call me His Royal Hotness, Prince Kian of Wildemar. Women across the world see me as a naughty fairy tale, an image I’m happy to indulge. As the spare to the heir, I’m the prince with none of the power . . . and all of the perks.

Then my twin brother is kidnapped, and suddenly I’m the one who could be king. The crown chasers start circling—and yet it’s a luscious waitress who catches my eye. With a smart mouth and the curves to back it up, Savannah Breslin is as brazen as I’d expect an American commoner to be.

But Savvy’s not interested in playing Cinderella. As sexy as she is, she’s no stranger to heartbreak. Besides, a nice guy wouldn’t drag her into all the drama that comes along with royalty. Lucky I’m not a nice guy. And, as it turns out, I might not even be her first prince. . . .

Review

I’ve read and enjoyed some of Tracy Wolff’s work before, so when I saw ROYAL PAIN on NetGalley, I quickly requested it because it sounded so good. Sadly, ROYAL PAIN was not an enjoyable read for me.

What did I like about it? That’s easy: the characters. I can’t say much about Savvy other than she’s nice and down-to-earth, but I can say a lot about Kian. He’s happy to be the spare heir, but when the situation calls for him to step up, he does. I liked his security detail and how he treats them like friends and not like servants who are beneath him. We didn’t see much of it, but he also has a great relationship with his brother and future king, Garrett.

What didn’t I like about it? Unfortunately, pretty much everything else.

It could be repetitive at times, and it was so wordy and full of inner monologue that I started skipping paragraphs just to get to the conversations, of which there weren’t a lot of.

While I liked Kian and Savvy, I didn’t feel the connection they were feeling because of how little time they spent together. I also thought it was strange that after just two brief encounters, he got angry with her because she hadn’t told him about a previous relationship she had with someone he knows. Considering they had spent—at most—an hour together at this point, I couldn’t understand why he insisted she should have told him already.

Finally, the sex scenes didn’t win me over. The first scene was thirty-one Kindle pages long, with their foreplay taking up twenty-eight of those pages, which was too long to keep me interested. I also couldn’t get my head around some of the mistakes I found. One example is when Savvy’s hands are pinned above her head, but on the next page she digs her nails into Kian’s shoulders and other places, but then on the next page Kian tightens his hold on her wrists…that he never let go of. This sort of thing might not be a big deal for some, but for me, it’s hard to visualize a scene with those kind of careless mistakes in it.

ROYAL PAIN is told in dual POVs and comes with a happy ending for Kian and Savvy. The next book, ROYAL TREATMENT, will be about Garrett and while I liked him, I don’t think I’ll be reading it.