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Princess Rosella is beautiful, kind, wise, graceful and magical. She is talented, and everything that she tries to do, with hard work and dedication, she excels at. Everyone loves her; not just her close knit family and friends – but the entire kingdom of Rose Mountain. Her magic is strong, and as her inherited powers skipped her parents generation (on both her mother and her father’s sides), she is set to inherit the most powerfully magical objects in the realm – the Staff of Light and the Amulet of Rose Mountain. With these artefacts in her possession, the princess is the target for an evil warlock named Mugwort. She barely escapes his clutches when he attacks Rose Mountain, freezing her entire family except for her brothers in retaliation for refusing his marriage proposal. With only her two inherited artefacts and her half brothers, she flees – determined to find the resources she needs to defeat him.
Although this is a charming story, unfortunately, it falls short in its telling. The prose is basic, with a lot of needless repetition of names and information; for example, Rosella’s many, many attributes are explained within the first few paragraphs – and then the reader is reminded of them before the end of the next page. And several more times over the chapter. Although her characteristics are important and central to the plot – the reader knows this, and doesn’t need to be told multiple times before they’ve even finished reading the first few pages. The speech between characters is clumsy, often sounding somewhat unnatural and forced. Frequent uses of names within speech, or reminders of the speaker’s various thoughts don’t flow as a conversation between friends, family and lovers would.
The initial trope of the good, kind, magically powerful, beautiful princess is somewhat overused in The Rose Princess. She’s a little bit too good, a little too kind. Rosella is said to have a bit of a bad temper, but it’s very rarely seen. Indeed, a little bit more anger would have made her character more palatable and it would have been nice to see her struggle with more moral dilemmas. It’s the same with all of the characters within the book. They’re all either good, or they’re bad. There is no middle ground, no moral greyness; which would have definitely elevated the plot.
The target audience of The Rose Princess is also somewhat confusing. It’s aimed towards the Young Adult market – so the age range from 12 upwards. However, it seems more to be aimed at the Middle-Grade market. There’s merely hints of romance, action and fight scenes – with anything even remotely graphic glossed over in more flowery prose.
As already mentioned, this is a charming tale that has great potential for further instalments.
S. A.
First published on Reedsy Discovery as part of their ARC program. You can read the original review here.
You can buy The Rose Princess from Amazon by clicking on the name of the book. You can also read it for free with Kindle Unlimited.