A review by lailybibliography
A Prince on Paper by Alyssa Cole

4.0

”He’d known how the fairy tales he’d memorized played out - there was unnecessary pain and suffering caused by the human need for love and shelter. And he’d known how they ended - with sadness and longing, and mothers dead and gone.”

A Prince on Paper was just as wonderful as I anticipated, and never before have I been more on board the Alyssa Cole train. This book had some exceptionally nuanced explorations of trauma from parental death, and parental abuse. Full trigger warnings for that. However, by far my favourite aspect of the novel was finally seeing a romance novel that did not present romantic love as some great cure for the trauma and abuse suffered by our leads. Far too often, such serious issues are portrayed simply as hurdles to be crossed by the main lovers, and not life-long repercussions for something truly horrifying. I was glad to see that how Nya and Johan’s problems weren’t magically fixed by their proximity to each other and eventually, shown to be slowly achieving healing with therapy. Even in the “happy ever after” epilogue section, it is mentioned that not everything is fine and it’s just so incredibly satisfying that the story doesn’t just fix their traumas for the sake of it.

The LGBTQIAP+ representation in this series continues to be incredible. The fact that Johan isn’t straight makes me happy beyond words. Queer royals in novels are always a soft spot for me for reasons I don’t know. And an actual non-binary royal, with an excellent exploration of their identity and how their strictly traditional environment affected their life. God, I just can’t even. I’d love a novel about Lukas and their university years in California. Pretty please, Alyssa Cole. Anything you write is an automatic read for me anyways, but, please.

”Though they both sometimes struggled not to fling their baggage at one another, most of their time was spent, well, happily ever after.”