Thank you to Karina Halle and the team at Berkley Romance for the advance reader copy of The Royals Upstairs.
I absolutely adored this Karina Halle royalty-adjacent romance! It pulled on my nostalgia heartstrings so much, not just due to cameos from past Royalty romances but the entire story felt like the Karina Halle contemporary romances I fell hard for when I first started reading her.
He’s the royal bodyguard. She’s the royal nanny. The annoyingly hot attraction that simmers between them—that’s a royal pain.
James Hunter has made a tactical error. His new role as protection officer to Prince Magnus of Norway was supposed to be an exciting change. Instead he’s marooned on a royal estate in the middle of nowhere charged with chasing after demon children and dodging the machinations of meddling staff. And the crowning jewel in this little drama—the children’s nanny is none other than Laila Bruset. The woman whose heart he broke. The woman who still holds his.
When Laila took the job as a nanny for the Norwegian royal children in order to be closer to her ailing grandmother in Oslo, the last thing she expected was to have her life turned upside down—again. But as much as James gets on her nerves, he’s also getting under her skin, and the tension between them sizzles just as devastatingly as before.
As undeniable sparks turn James and Laila’s battle royal into a more serious game of hearts, nanny and bodyguard will have to decide just how much they’re willing to risk for a second chance at love.
Check out my more detailed thoughts below…
- Characters: Laila Bruset and James Hunter have a history, she is the darling nanny and he is the charming bodyguard, roles they played before for a different family. This is a workplace romance blended with the perfect balance of enemies-to-lovers and second-chance romance. It is easy to love Laila, she is the type of character readers love to root for. James makes you work for it a bit more, but as the story progressed and he got more vulnerable he was easy to fall for too, and the Scottish charm sure did not hurt. I cannot discuss the characters without expressing the utter joy of the cameos. New readers will for sure want to jump into The Wild Heir after being introduced to Magnus and Ella. For the seasoned Karina Halle fan it is the perfect look into not just Magnus and Ella, king and queen but them as parents and their kids.
- Setting: Laila and James work for the Norwegian royalty family, so the story is set in Norway. I consistently love how Karina writes foreign settings, she brings them to life. I do not even know what I loved more the charms of the city and its people, or the true gem of a setting that was the remote family vacation home. Talk about forced proximity, I loved the isolating feeling of the way all the characters were forced to spend so much time together. I never wanted that bubble to burst, I just wanted to live in this book.
- Pacing: I flew through this story just because I loved it too much and wanted to keep soaking up each word. I read it in maybe about two and a half hours and was enraptured. It felt like such a coming home, the same vibe as many of the first books I read from Karina and of course a wonderful nod to her superb royalty romances. This phenomenal book made me cry multiple times like my partner came to check on me if I was okay type of cry. Trust me, for many readers if you have gone through any similar experiences that Laila has with her grandmother you will be bawling. Karina does such a phenomenal job as I knew she would addressing grief and emotional trauma. The flashbacks were such a perfect storytelling device for this one and really elevated reading the romance in the current timeline by getting to understand what went wrong in the first place.
- Romance: Books like this are the best reminder of how much a second-chance romance can just deliver an epic love story! The messy, unresolved feelings are complicated, but so is any relationship and throughout the story I love how Laila and James begin to lean on each other more. They open up to each other in such beautiful ways. The romance has its slow-burn nature, but that just makes the pinning and pretending that there are no feelings that much more delectable. I loved them sneaking around and trying to keep everyone else from figuring out what was happening, while they were trying to figure out what was happening themselves.
- Spice: I saw some complaints about too much spice and those peeps don’t listen to them! The scenes between Laila and James are so perfectly passionate and deliciously sensual and steamy. I ate up every moment of them together!
The Royals Upstairs is 5/5 stars
You can pick up the story here.
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Thank you again to Karina and her team for the review opportunity. Thank you for reading and supporting my blog!
