User blog:General Khor/The Royal Review

Hello and welcome to another review blog by General Khor. So as you know, last Saturday, I finally did it. I finally finished Choices' longest franchise, Kara's magnum opus, and the most popular series to date, The Royal Franchise! And with that, I've finally finished Kara's entire king-sized package, from The Crown & the Flame to Rules of Engagement to this very series (as well as The Royal Masquerade, that is), so yeah, tell her I send my compliments. And now, here's the blog you've all been waiting for. I will also be talking a bit about TC&TF, TRM and RoE, so yeah, spoilers obviously.

Introduction
So, The Royal Franchise is a series that has mesmerised and captivated the fandom since it began, and after four and a half years, the curtains have finally closed on this series. So why is this story so popular? Well, who doesn't like a fairytale romance? An ordinary waitress meets a prince, has to fight her way for his hand while the royal court (well, the king, really) tries his best to stop her, but she finally wins his hand, they get married and live happily ever after, right? But then, because of the series' popularity, PB decided that wasn't enough, which led them to write a sequel series about fighting threats to the kingdom while raising the royal heir, and if that's still not enough, why not add a global threat to finish off the story? Given all this, you can see why this series came to be one of the greatest franchises in Choices. Not to mention, there are loads of great characters with diverse personalities, but we'll go into that later. I'll be announcing my rating at the end of this blog, so for now, without further ado, let's get into the discussion.

Book 1 (The Royal Romance 1) (Warning: RoE Spoilers!)
So, we start off as a waitress at a bar in New York. Enter our future LIs, Drake, Maxwell and of course, Prince Liam. At first it was just a normal day, until Liam reveals his identity, and Maxwell sends us an invitation to compete for his hand. And so, the adventure begins. When we arrive, we meet the other ladies of the court (including Hana, the last LI), as well as our sponsor, Bertrand Beaumont, who isn't happy that his younger brother decided to invite a commoner. An American commoner, An American commoner divorcee twice over (Gasp!). Well, just kidding about the last part. But he still agrees to sponsor us anyway. We participate in several events throughout the social season to impress the king and queen (we've seen them before in RoE, after all that was when we first see Cordonia), as well as the people and the press, despite the hazing by Madeleine the queen bee (who also first appeared in RoE) and Olivia Nevrakis. That's right, that infamous family still lives on. Remember Theodosia from TRM? She was the head of the Nevrakis family at that time. Anyway, we manage to gain the king and queen's approval, and at the end of the social season, we have a last dance with soon-to-be-king Liam. At the end of the book, we meet Liam's older brother Leo (Remember that guy? Didn't I say he has a brother who's gonna be big? I mentioned it in my review for RoE in my 2021 end of year review blog), and then, a video suddenly starts circulating that shows us seemingly having an affair with someone, and fans immediately know we're set up so that Maddy will win the competition.

In short, my rating for this book is...

Meh

That's right, this is just the beginning, and there's more excitement to come.

Book 2 (The Royal Romance 2)
So, after we're framed for having an affair with now-king Liam's friend Tariq, we were supposed to be exiled, but the Beaumont brothers manage to bring us back, and we decide to find evidence to catch whoever's behind our current situation. Meanwhile, queen-to-be Madeleine uses her position to lord over the entire court, and she especially likes bullying Hana, who is desperately pleading with her parents not to drag her home after losing the competition. We have to follow the court on an international trip to celebrate Liam's engagement to the Queen Bee of Cordonia and question suspects while enduring Maddy's gloating along the way. The witnesses point us towards the former king and queen, and some fans were quick to paint Regina as Liam's wicked stepmother, but then Regina points out that Bastien, Liam's bodyguard (who was also Leo's in RoE) and one of those involved in setting us up, doesn't really take orders from her, and that's when we realise that the mastermind was none other than the former king himself, Constantine.

Suddenly, His Former Majesty has a coughing fit and struggles to breathe, and after we get him to the hospital, we finally learn why he abdicated at the end of Book 1, and why he wanted Maddy to be queen. It turns out that Constantine has final stage lung cancer and his days are numbered, and that revelation really turned me into a crying mess. Sure, he may have set us up and committed a scandal that could tarnish the royal family's reputation, but who wouldn't feel sorry for him when he's dying of an illness? Nevertheless, he agrees to help us fix this whole mess, and after we clear our name, Liam finally proposes to us and guess what, I immediately accepted (Hooray!). In the book finale, just when things seem to get back to normal, masked gunmen suddenly attack the palace. Uh oh, you know what that means.

And so, my rating for this book is...

EXCITING!

That's right, and it'll only get more exciting from here on out.

Book 3 (The Royal Romance 3) (Warning: TC&TF Spoilers!)
So, at the start of the book, the palace is attacked by a group of unknown assassins, and Drake is shot in the commotion. so after we tend to him, in order to raise the people's morale, we take a tour of the kingdom, and this is when we learn that Cordonia evolved from the Five Kingdoms of TC&TF, and those kingdoms evolved into the Five Great Duchies of the modern era. We visit each duchy one by one to convince the families of the ladies to attend our wedding. During this time, the attackers burn down the royal orchard, then in Chapter 11, they attack the palace again, and Constantine is killed in the attack. To think he showed remorse for everything he's done in the previous books just before the attack, so that hit me kind of hard.

Then, we track the enemies to Lythikos (which you can probably tell evolved from Abanthus, as the name most likely comes from Lykos, the capital of the kingdom), and we discover that some members of the Nevrakis family still hold on to King Luther's legacy of conquest and tyranny, such as Olivia's parents and aunt Lucretia, who arranged for Olivia to marry the leader of the attackers, Anton Severus of the Sons of Earth, just so that they can get rid of Liam and fulfill Luther's dream of conquering Cordonia once and for all. However, while Lucretia is taken into custody, Anton escapes. We spend the next few chapters planning our wedding, and after having to fight off another attack, we finally get married, but after the ceremony, Anton's men capture us and Olivia so that Liam will be left defenceless, however we manage to escape and with the help of our friends, we finally capture Anton. And so, we did it, we won, right? Well, not so fast, there are still more books to come, remember?

With all that said, my rating for this book is...

EXCITING!

And that concludes The Royal Romance trilogy, but there's still more excitement in store in the next few books.

Now, I guess this blog is gonna be kind of long, and I just found out you can only write so much in a blogpost, so I'll be talking about Part 2 here. That's all for now, thank you for reading.