Alyssa returns to Florida to continue her summer job as a princess at a very popular theme park. Her long-distance boyfriend is on his way back into town as well and she’s excited to rekindle their not so smooth relationship. But as more problems arise with her Prince Charming, she has to decide if she’s ready for something more than a fairy tale—something real.

Aside from a few problems at the beginning of the book, I immediately got caught up in the story and really enjoyed myself. I read this book in one day, practically one sitting. It was funny and sweet, but also had some real-world problems thrown in there. It’s really fun to see a behind the scenes look at the characters/employees at a major theme park like the Disney Parks. It was also really interesting to look at life from Alyssa’s perspective: a sorority sister, princess, counts her calories/weighs herself daily, and full face of makeup to the gym type girl. None of that is relatable to me, so I was surprised by how much I grew to care about her. She’s almost annoyingly happy and positive, but it’s in such a genuine way that how can you judge her for fitting this stereotype? She does have problems and things go deeper than the surface, but it’s not in the expected way, so it was refreshing. As for Miller, I just loved him.

After I finished the book though, I started thinking about it and realizing the many, many problems I had with it. We’ll start with my problem at the beginning of the book: the group of girls go lingerie shopping. It was nothing crazy, but at the same time, I really didn’t want to know about that, and I didn’t want or need any of those descriptions. And when Alyssa thinks it’s a good idea to solve her relationship problems by throwing that in her boyfriend’s face, no…just no.

My other problems are:

1. It took a really long time for things to end with the initial boyfriend. I get that the relationship needed to go through both of them trying to fix it for it to really end and Alyssa to even be able to think of moving on so soon, but then there wasn’t enough time for Miller.

2. It really felt like Miller was an afterthought. And I can’t ignore the facts of how he was treated after reading the acknowledgements where the author practically admits it. She thanked her team for their feedback and said “Without your nudging, Miller wouldn’t even exist.”

3. The ending was very rushed. There was hardly enough time for Miller and Alyssa’s relationship to grow to then fight and get back together.

4. It felt like I read two different books where the second one just stopped right in the middle. Aside from all of my issues with timing, the first part and the second part of the book felt very separated. Almost like Alyssa was a different person. There wasn’t enough explanation given about her change after so much description of trying to work through the first relationship.

5. Miller seemed like a rebound. This did come up in the book, and Alyssa tried to deny it, but there just wasn’t enough time between the relationships. When Miller was only given as many pages in the book as the ex and half of that time Alyssa was getting over a breakup, it’s just not enough.

6. Alyssa treated Miller badly and as someone undeserving of her. Miller isn’t the typical description of a prince—he’s short-ish with a beard and a little bit of a gut. He was friend zoned, and she couldn’t picture him with a girl liker her. The things she ended up liking about him could also be insulting: he’s soft, she didn’t care about what she ate in front of him, and she was so surprised about how much she liked kissing him.

I know I have this really long list of problems, but I also did like the book. I just think it could have very easily been a 5 star read if it was handled a little bit differently. That being said, I wouldn’t consider this a Young Adult book. The characters are in college or have graduated college and are definitely adults dealing with adult situations.