Monday Book Review: FINDING MY PRINCE CHARMING by J.S. Cooper

Finding My Prince Charming, by J.S. Cooper
Published 2014

About the Book:

Can a Playboy Prince ever be tamed?

When Lola Franklin decided to study abroad she never anticipated embarking on a whirlwind weekend romance with a hot guy before classes started.

And she certainly never counted on the hot guy being her new professor. Or a Prince. Or the biggest asshole she had ever met.

Xavier Van Romerius is the playboy Prince of Europe and he loves his life. He doesn’t do relationships, and never wants to get married. But when he see’s Lola Franklin flirting with his little brother Casper, he realizes that maybe he needs to rethink his ideas about love before the wrong Prince gets the girl.

MY TAKE:

Told in alternating first person points of view between the main characters, Finding my Prince Charming is both disappointing and maddening on many levels.

This is a New Adult contemporary romance that tries to be Lolita mashed with 50 Shades, with a student/teacher relationship that borders on icky. The characters teeter on the edge of likeable, while the scenarios sit precariously close to the edge of unbelievable.

Lola is an American college student studying art history in London. She is the quintessential innocent abroad, and catches the wandering eye of a foreign prince who also just happens to be her professor, and who seems obsessed with Nabokov. It all goes downhill from there.

I kept wanting to like one or both of them but they kept doing and saying the most ridiculous things, and putting themselves in stupid and sometimes dangerous situations. I once was that American college student studying abroad, and admit I made one or two bad decisions along the way, but you don't keep repeating the same mistakes. The author gives Lola so little backbone it's utterly disappointing, and the girl doesn't learn anything except how to satiate the prince's twisted sexual fantasies.

The cover claims that Cooper is a New York Times best seller, but maybe her sales are in a different genre, or maybe there is a section of the NA audience who like their heroines submissive. Not my cup of tea, and won't be reading more from this author.

There are tons of great New Adult romances out there - this just isn't one of them. Feel free to leave your suggestions in my comment section, because I need to wipe the taste of this book out of my mind!