Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I give the Royal Companion two out of five stars for its poor plot construction, narrative mistakes a professional editor should have caught, and YA romance clichés clumsily mixed with the serious themes of sex trafficking, abortion, and slavery. Don’t read this book if you want romance or like happily ever after endings. This book is not correctly listed in an appropriate genre on Amazon. It’s highest ranking is under Romance-historical-medieval, landing it beside Regency Romances. It is also listed under YA Romance Fantasy fiction. Neither of these categories is appropriate. The sexual situations depicted are incongruent. This read will disappoint Regency Romance enthusiasts. I’ve read steamier bedroom scenes in Amish and Christian Romances. The most detailed scene involving sex is the gang rape. I think it's a poor choice when an author portrays gratuitous sexual violence but skips or shirks details of intimate scenes. For me this makes the narrative feel unbalanced and novice. What I liked: 1) The themes that were explored including: people as property and how we are all beholden to someone, loves immunity to class subdivision, and the value of women. While I don’t think the story flushes out each of these themes, I do like the way the author dipped her toes into it. These themes not being sufficiently illustrated or exploited are part of what makes the novel unsatisfying, and work that would have benefit from a professional manuscript edit. What I didn’t like: 1) The ending. The one hook that pulled me through the narrative was: will the hero, Prince Tyron and the heroine, Aldera be together in a more permanent way than what already existed when she was purchased as his Companion. Declarations of love were not presented as Aldera’s goal or what she needed to be happy in her life as a Companion. This made the ending flat and unsatisfying. 2) The plot. What the protagonists need to overcome to live happily ever after is their separation based on a class system. The end of the book does not resolve this plot arch. If this is suppose to be continued on and resolved later in the series, it isn’t set up well or foreshadowed in a way that the reader can surmise. The hero and heroine lacking defined goals further weaken the plot. The reader is never told what Tyron or Aldera want out of life. This makes all character actions base and the story’s pace aimless. a. The hero’s conflict is related to PTSD from war and infighting with his older brother and father. He suffers due to his perpetual servitude as the soldier/war-leading figurehead for his family. The hero does little to express his motivation to serve his country or family in this role. He also does nothing to change, alter, or accept the hand he is dealt. He is passive and waits to make decisions until he no longer has a decision to make, which is by far one of the worst traits a warrior can have. He allows events, and other people to dictate his outcomes, which makes him unsympathetic and overall a non-swoon worthy looser of a hero. b. The heroine’s conflict is her status as property and the realization that all women in this fictitious place, to include the queen and princess, are property who can be bought, sold, bargained for, or owned through servitude. The heroine’s actions appear aimless since she never expresses any goals. We know she cares about her family and friends, but its difficult to determine if she wants to return to the farm, find contentment where she is, or seek a life where she can have more control over her destiny. The ending told me the heroine was content, but the actions and feeling in the narrative don’t support this. I don’t believe at the end of the book that Aldera has come to terms with the conflict she continually ruminates on as a Companion. 3) YA Romance clichés clumsily mixed with serious themes of sex trafficking, abortion, and slavery. The clichés of love at first sight, Cinderella, and Pygmalion/My Fair Lady are intertwined with the heroine’s mother selling her into life as a sex slave for two gold coins. The heroine’s forbidden to conceive children, and any child she conceives would destroy her life as a Companion, be aborted, or kill her in the process of being aborted. She lives in harem of women who are raped by the men who own them or passed off to their owner’s friends at parties to be raped. I had a hard time dwelling on the more serious themes raised in the book because all the rape was swirled into this cliché fantasy-would be medieval world with hunts, horse back riding, archery practice, snow shoveling, and expensive dress up time. Every scene of the royal family’s political dealings can be skipped. They were unnecessary, predictable, and poorly constructed. Overall the read was a disappointment and I will not be reading the rest of the series.