Thanks to Harper Collins and Avon books for the free advance copy of this book.

The latest book in the Reluctant Royals series, A PRINCE ON PAPER is the story of Nya and Johan. After years of being passing acquaintances, Johan impulsively asks Nya to pretend to be his fiancée as a PR move against his playboy image. You can probably guess how this works out for them!

I love the trope of a fake relationship, and this one is a stunner. Mix in some shades of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and A PRINCE ON PAPER stacks up nicely with the other books in this series.

This installment sees Nya reunited with previous series heroines Naledi and Portia, and it’s so wonderful to have them all together. I love that Nya turns to her friends for support and advice in a way that’s treated as equal to or more important than the support she receives from Johan. Noting that, I do think this is one of the rare romance novels where you do need to read the other books to put this one into context. Otherwise a lot of the conversations and references to secondary characters and events from the other books won’t make any sense.

I really appreciated how trauma was treated in this book - how it can be triggered in seemingly nonsensical ways. Even when the characters’ motivations for keeping secrets didn’t really make sense to me, those motivations made sense in their minds, and those lasting effects were illustrated painfully and beautifully.

I won’t spoil it, but suffice to say this story has a really lovely queer subplot (which more than makes up for Likotsi being barely present in this book, all books should have more Likotsi).