Princess and the Player: ARC Review
Well hello there again favorites! Back with another advance review. This time for Ilsa Madden-Mill’s upcoming contemporary sports romance Princess and the Player, book 2 in her Strangers in Love series. Having read book one (featuring Nova and Ronan) and feeling a little lukewarm about it, I was hesitant to jump into this one. And after reading it I think I might still have a few, uh weird feelings about it?
As always huge thanks to NetGalley and Montlake for the advance copy, thoughts below are my own.
One of my very first thoughts when I sat down to write this review, went something like: If Vi Keeland’s The Baller and P. Dangelico’s Wrecking Ball had a baby, it would be Princess and the Player. I’m currently pretty torn about my full feelings on this one, I’ll be honest.
At it’s core this is a one-night-stand-turned-accidental-pregnancy. Which when done well can be really slow burn-y, sweet and VERY satisfying. But there were so many a,b,c,d (and so on…) plots happening at once that I really struggled to connect with the overarching love story.
First we have the trauma filled back-stories of both Tuck and Francesca. Which are SO heavy. Montlake, hook a reader up with some trigger warnings. Physical abuse, abandonment of a child, terrible experiences in foster care, addiction trauma, suicide of a parent, negative depictions of someone living with Bipolar disease, almost sexual assault at a sex club, a throw away line about a hysterectomy from endometriosis, like y’all what the actual heck?! Folks, please take good care of yourself if any of the above is hard for you to sit with, read or process.
There were some good moments, and honestly I would have loved to kind of just ditch all the trauma-porn and hang out in what seemed to be a less murder-y Arconia (from Only Murders in the Building), with Darden and the Widow, and whoever else goes to bookclub and shits on Nicholas Sparks books. THAT would have been a real treat.
And for fans of the accidental pregnancy trope (of which there are many) if you’re looking for care-taking, sweet baby daddy moments or two almost perfect strangers bonding over the duration of the pregnancy, there is almost none, because spoiler alert she hides it from him for almost the entire duration of the book, which (you guessed it) leads to the 3rd act break up. And the biggest, most essential issue I have with all of this, is while he’s on his yacht “processing” and coming to his whirlwind of a realization, she’s also FIGURING OUT WHO HER PARENTS WERE THAT ABANDONED HER, who are both dead (and died in really horribly traumatic ways).
Listen, this book may work for you. You may read it and love it, and to you I say: YES! LOVE THIS FOR YOU! For me, it was a lot and made my head hurt and my heart a little heavy. If you’re interested in picking up Princess and the Player, grab it wherever you get your books when it hits shelves November 8th, 2022.