A Review of Undercover Princess

Undercover Princess is the first book in The Rosewood Chronicles series by Connie Glynn, who is also know as Noodlerella on YouTube. Lottie Pumpkin has been accepted to the prestigious Rosewood Hall on a scholarship. She's always had her head in the clouds, and a love of fairytales. So it might be fate that she ends up rooming with Ellie Wolf, who happens to be the Princess of Maradova.

Look, I'm easy to please. If your book is about royalty, I'll at least give it a chance. Bonus points if it's also about princesses.

Rosewood Hall isn't a school for royalty, exactly. It's a posh boarding school, for all intents and purposes. It does well with students who are exceptional, have the potential to be exceptional, or whose parents are paying for the school in hopes it will make them exceptional. High-ranking politicians, Olympic athletes, famous people of stage or screen - in short, exceptional in their respective fields, even if they aren't always household names. It actually fills a unique niche, giving readers a fictional school they may actually want to attend. I can't remember this being a thing since Harry Potter, and Rosewood Hall is distinct in that it does keep to mostly normal lessons.

I did like Lottie. I liked her love of fairytales - she reminds me of me. I felt at first there was a lot of telling and not showing. Lottie's circumstances at the school are stated to be exceptional, and there's nothing extraordinary about her. However, as the book goes on, she displays deduction skills and a level of quick thinking that weren't apparent at first glance. Ellie is very much a cookie-cutter rebellious princess. There's not a lot to say, but I would like some character development of her either accepting her role as a way she can change things, or having the courage to reject it altogether. Binah reads like an exaggerated parody of the "smart people use big words" stereotype. It did get on my nerves after a while. Most of the rest of the cast here aren't distinctive enough to be worth mentioning.

I wasn't sure how anyone could mistake a princess with a wild reputation with shy and anxious Lottie, even if they did think she was putting it on. Especially when Princess Eleanor Wolfson was hiding under the name Ellie Wolf. Brilliant disguise.

So was I the only one to think there might be something between Lottie and Ellie? Lottie feels jealous when Ellie hangs out with another girl, and Ellie sings a song for her about a Princess and her portman/partizan who were close as more then friends.

I was actually curious about both the terms, portman and partizan, so I looked them up. I can't find any reference to portman being used as a specific term for someone who disguised themselves as a royal to protect the royal. Any googling just got me a list of Natalie Portman films in which she played royals. I realise Glynn did make up the concept of partizan, but I was curious if maybe it was an ancient word for a soldier in any language. I did understand that neither are in common use or would be accepted practice today, but I was curious if there was any historical context to either of them. It seems more like Glynn invented the terms. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is something to bear in mind.

The writing style could use a little work. I'm being nice, because it is, at least, readable. Sometimes the sentence structure is odd, and the dialogue makes it hard to tell who is who. The passage of time, and therefore the pacing of the book, is jumpy, too. We spend the majority of the book in the time between September and Christmas, but we seem to jump from the 9th of January to summer in about two chapters.

I'd like to know a bit more about the country of Maradova. It's near Russia, used to be part of the British Empire so it speaks English, that I can buy. But surely Russian is still commonly spoken? What did it do in the Second World War? What's the capital city called? Any famous monuments? Is it part of the EU, does it use the Euro?

Look, it's not going to change the world, and it's not going to be studied in literature classes 100 years from now. But reading is 90% context. For a fun, relaxed afternoon it was good. And if you're going on holiday to, oh I don't know, DisneyWorld or something, it's an easy read that also fits in the theme.

I recommend this book as one to bridge the gap between MG and YA. The protagonists are fourteen, older than most middle grade but younger than a lot of young adult, and it's written in an easy reading style.