The Royal Pain

The Royal Pain - MaryJanice Davidson

This was a pretty dull read for being a MaryJanice Davidson book.

Princess Alex has severe insomnia, so her family's psychiatrist decides that a break from her normal surroundings might help and suggests that Alex takes a trip to help with the opening of an aquarium. However, when Alex gets there, she meets Dr. Sheldon Rivers who isn't happy at the prospect of having her bothering him while he works. For whatever reason, Alex thinks Sheldon's rudeness and grumpy behavior is hot. From there, the story devolves into a back and forth between the two either having sex or bickering.

My biggest problem with The Royal Pain is that there is no conflict. The story is entirely motivated by Alex and Sheldon bickering. I'm a fan of character driven stories, but not when their personalities never even clash. Everyone gets along, there's no real build up about Sheldon hating royals or even Alex's insomnia. In fact, those two problems hardly got mentioned after being brought up. Sheldon's attitude about rich people was mentioned once in the very beginning and then never brought up until the last couple of pages. As for Alex's insomnia.... Yes we see that she's not sleeping through most of the book but everyone is pretty "meh" about it, so when she does finally manage to get some sleep its not a big deal. Even though towards the end I started missing her insomnia because it was the one thing that made her character interesting.

I probably won't be continuing this series.