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gabbyhm's review against another edition
dark
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
esabel's review against another edition
5.0
Beautifully written. Nothing overtly creepy happens, but the whole book has an undercurrent of darkness. It had very thought provoking ideas on the cost of beauty, both one's own beauty and the beauty of outside forces.
It's scarier and more unsettling because you know it's based on true stories.
It's scarier and more unsettling because you know it's based on true stories.
abbyplatt's review against another edition
2.0
I just didn’t like it. I’m very confused by the high rating.
baileygay's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
4.0
itssunnytoday's review against another edition
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
i think the reason this is not a full out 5 star review is because, compared to fake like me and i'll eat when i'm dead, there's a little bit too much exposition if that makes sense?
honestly that's nickpicking because it's another 10/10 from barbara bourland, i was thrown off by the whole fairytale at first but she made the whole scenario so believable and truly places you in the narrator's headspace. the many twists and turns were neatly hidden and thus surprisng, at least to me-especially the ending ! omg.
honestly that's nickpicking because it's another 10/10 from barbara bourland, i was thrown off by the whole fairytale at first but she made the whole scenario so believable and truly places you in the narrator's headspace. the many twists and turns were neatly hidden and thus surprisng, at least to me-especially the ending ! omg.
willowkat's review against another edition
5.0
oh i devoured this, this was such a good book, this was so much better than I expected from the synopsis, this is a fantastic book
katherinesreadingalot's review against another edition
I will definitely come back to it because I am invested in the story but I’m not in the mood to read something heavy right now
marmoo's review against another edition
4.0
This novel is aptly titled, as the Olympian-turned-princess protagonist muddles through calculating the exchange rate on the currency of her beauty. The “force” of that beauty operates in two senses of the word, first as a power granting her a precarious access to certain rarefied spaces, but then as a coercive, external weight of other people’s expectations and demands.
It doesn’t take much for Barbara Bourland to twist a princess fairytale into a nightmare, drawing heavy inspiration from the real-life tribulations of Princess Charlene of Monaco, Princess Diana, and Megan Markle for her fictional Princess Caroline.
When her new, royal fiancé buys her a fur coat, Caroline talks herself out of a moment of revulsion by thinking, “And instead of pitying the beings that clothed me, I told myself that in wearing their skin, I was animal again, protected by and living for them.” This justification is only the first in a series of moral compromises, as Bourland surgically chops up the myth of a benevolent, noblesse oblige approach to global capitalism.
“I wanted equality as a backdrop so I could prove without doubt that I was the exception,” Caroline finally admits years later in the novel. “The truth was that people in power, people like us, almost certainly only became extraordinarily bad.”
This is a novel that is forceful and unambiguous in passing such moral judgements. But even where it drifted toward the didactic—about the inherent evil of extreme wealth in a global financial system built on exploitation, about the limits of personal agency in relationships with significant power imbalances, about the brutality of motherhood under patriarchal control—I appreciated its clarity of moral conviction.
It doesn’t take much for Barbara Bourland to twist a princess fairytale into a nightmare, drawing heavy inspiration from the real-life tribulations of Princess Charlene of Monaco, Princess Diana, and Megan Markle for her fictional Princess Caroline.
When her new, royal fiancé buys her a fur coat, Caroline talks herself out of a moment of revulsion by thinking, “And instead of pitying the beings that clothed me, I told myself that in wearing their skin, I was animal again, protected by and living for them.” This justification is only the first in a series of moral compromises, as Bourland surgically chops up the myth of a benevolent, noblesse oblige approach to global capitalism.
“I wanted equality as a backdrop so I could prove without doubt that I was the exception,” Caroline finally admits years later in the novel. “The truth was that people in power, people like us, almost certainly only became extraordinarily bad.”
This is a novel that is forceful and unambiguous in passing such moral judgements. But even where it drifted toward the didactic—about the inherent evil of extreme wealth in a global financial system built on exploitation, about the limits of personal agency in relationships with significant power imbalances, about the brutality of motherhood under patriarchal control—I appreciated its clarity of moral conviction.
thebookcases's review against another edition
Not what I was expecting and didn't keep my interest. The blurb online has changed now but the original blurb I read was misleading and I was disappointed in the type of book it turned out to be. It's probably fine if you're expecting a literary fiction and not a low-none magic fantasy like I was.