Delightful story of a girl,. Lottie Pumpkin who is an ordinary girl who wants to be a princess and gets a scholarship to a elite school where she ends up in a room with a real-life princess Ellie Wolf who longs to be ordinary. This leads them to a situation where Lottie is rumoured to be the princess and then becomes a decoy and finds another world and life for herself. Can she keep all her lives going?

It's interesting and fun and while there are moments of severe suspension of disbelief I still enjoyed it.

[I received a copy of this book through NetGalley.]

There were good ideas in there, and I was fairly thrilled at first at the setting and prospects (a boarding school in England, hidden royals that looked like they’d be badass, etc.), but I must say that in the end, even though I read the novel in a rather short time and it didn’t fall from my hands, it was all sort of bland.

The writing itself was clunky, and while it did have good parts (the descriptions of the school, for instance, made the latter easy to picture), it was more telling, not showing most of the time. I’m usually not too regarding on that, I tend to judge first on plot and characters, and then only on style, but here I found it disruptive. For instance, the relationship between Ellie and Lottie has a few moments that border on the ‘what the hell’ quality: I could sense they were supposed to hint at possible romantic involvement (or at an evolution in that direction later), but the way they were described, it felt completely awkward (and not ‘teenage-girls-discovering-love’ cute/awkward).

The characters were mostly, well, bland. I feel it was partly tied to another problem I’ll mention later, namely that things occur too fast, so we had quite a few characters introduced, but not developed. Some of their actions didn’t make sense either, starting with Princess Eleanor Wolfson whose name undercover gets to be... Ellie Wolf? I’m surprised she wasn’t found out from day one, to be honest. Or the head of the house who catches the girls sneaking out at night and punishes them by offering them a cup of tea (there was no particular reason for her to be lenient towards them at the time, and if that was meant to hint at a further plot point, then we never reached that point in the novel).

(On that subject, I did however like the Ellie/Lottie friendship in general. It started in a rocky way, that at first made me wonder how come they went from antipathy to friendship in five minutes; however, considering the first-impression antipathy was mostly based on misunderstanding and a bit of a housework matter, it’s not like it made for great enmity reasons either, so friendship stemming from the misunderstanding didn’t seem so silly in hindsight. For some reason, too, the girls kind of made me think of ‘Utena’—probably because of the setting, and because Ellie is boyish and sometimes described as a prince rather than a princess.)

The story, in my opinion, suffers from both a case of ‘nothing happens’ and ‘too many things happen’. It played with several different plot directions: boarding school life; undercover princess trying to keep her secret while another girl tries to divert all attention on her as the official princess; prince (and potential romantic interest) showing up; mysterious boy (and potential romantic interest in a totally different way) showing up; the girls who may or may not be romantically involved in the future; trying to find out who’s leaving threatening messages; Binah’s little enigma, and the way it ties into the school’s history, and will that ever play a part or not; Anastacia and the others, and who among them leaked the rumour; going to Maradova; the summer ball; the villains and their motivations. *If* more time had been spent on these subplots, with more character development, I believe the whole result would’ve been more exciting. Yet at the same time all this gets crammed into the novel, there’s no real sense of urgency either, except in the last few chapters. That was a weird dichotomy to contend with.

Conclusion: 1.5 stars. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll be interested in reading the second book. I did like the vibes between Lottie and Ellie, though.

Confession: I'm a bit of a Dodie fangirl. I enjoy her YouTube videos and her music. I'm kind of shocked I was approved to read this book, as I am a little "nobody" in the blogger/reviewer world, but it has happened, I'm reading it and liking it so far.

I kind of really like her. She's quirky and has a good singing voice. Her videos usually have meaning other than getting views for money, at least I think so. I don't watch every one of her videos. In fact, I do not watch every video of any person I follow on YouTube. I just feel like she is genuine. She talks about her mental health openly, isn't afraid to be herself, in fact a lot of her videos is sans makeup, even with acne/acne scars and I find that so refreshing. I think we should not be so focused on how we look. So we get pimples? So we gain weight? We're all human and these things happen! Dodie can be a role model to other people with similar experiences, though watch her with caution, as there have been viewers that mentioned watching people talk about anxiety, depression...etc can be triggering for them, because sometimes she is known to get in a dark place with her Instagram and Snap Chat stories.

In this video, Dodie wonders if there is a such thing as oversharing when it comes to depression...etc

Am I oversharing?

In this video she follows up and apologizes.

Follow Up

I'm not big on YouTuber books, but got really excited for Dodie's book. Maybe she will change my mind about these sort of books and I will give more a chance. Though I am not sure I follow too many people who have published.

There is Connie Glynn "Noodlerella's" fiction novel, which I am curious about. Undercover Princess by Connie Glynn. The name and plot sound quite cliche and I can swear I have read something exactly like it before, like on Wattpad, so that is bugging me! But I do want to give it a try, as I enjoy Connie's YouTube channels as well.

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The only YouTube book I have tried to read is:

Gabbie is from "The Gabbie Show" and I've only watched a couple of her videos.

And this book wasn't for me, sadly.

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Disclaimer: I received "Secrets For The Mad" by Dodie Clark from Netgally in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for the chance to read this! Review will come closer to publication date, which is in November.