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Once Upon a Kiss #10
The Princess Test
Carlita Santaro has never felt like a "proper" princess, and she's finally escaped the palace for the small town of Winter Haven.
Daniel is an award-winning journalist, but now, as a single dad, he's working on a gossip show—better hours but rock-bottom morals. His boss orders Daniel to test suspiciously down-to-earth Carlita—is she really royal, or just posing as a princess?
Carlita captivates Daniel, but soon he'll have to Should he follow the headlines, or his heart?
Daniel is an award-winning journalist, but now, as a single dad, he's working on a gossip show—better hours but rock-bottom morals. His boss orders Daniel to test suspiciously down-to-earth Carlita—is she really royal, or just posing as a princess?
Carlita captivates Daniel, but soon he'll have to Should he follow the headlines, or his heart?
- GenresRomanceHarlequin Romance
256 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
About the author
Shirley Jump
450 books743 followersShirley Jump is a writing instructor and an award-winning, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and USA Today bestselling author who has published more than 80 books in 24 countries. She has spoken all over the world about the power of narrative and how to create compelling books. A former reporter and communications director for a marketing agency, she uses her diverse background to help clients create impactful books that readers can’t down.
She knows the path to publication isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, so to help writers write their best possible book, she offers monthly Manuscript Masterminds through her website, www.WritingCompellingFiction.com.
On her channel, https://YouTube.com/@WritingCompellin..., she unlocks the secrets behind compelling novels and delves into the psychological aspect of overcoming creativity-stoppers like doubt and perfectionism. Follow her channel for more writing exercises, classes, and behind-the-scenes writing lessons or join her Manuscript Mastermind to build your tribe of like-minded writers and receive crucial feedback on your pages.
She knows the path to publication isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, so to help writers write their best possible book, she offers monthly Manuscript Masterminds through her website, www.WritingCompellingFiction.com.
On her channel, https://YouTube.com/@WritingCompellin..., she unlocks the secrets behind compelling novels and delves into the psychological aspect of overcoming creativity-stoppers like doubt and perfectionism. Follow her channel for more writing exercises, classes, and behind-the-scenes writing lessons or join her Manuscript Mastermind to build your tribe of like-minded writers and receive crucial feedback on your pages.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 2, 2022
Oh wow, I really loved this book..& I don’t mean that in an “I didn’t expect to enjoy this” kind of way but more of an….wow, this feels way different than what we get from Harlequin’s Romance line now. Don’t get me wrong- I love that line, it’s my current favorite But…it’s very apparent that this specific era of Harlequin Romances had a different vibe than the ones we get now do.
I typically don’t really care about royalty romances but I really liked this one. Princess goes to small town Indiana for reasons and falls in love. It was light and charming and I read it in a day. Really sweet read.
I typically don’t really care about royalty romances but I really liked this one. Princess goes to small town Indiana for reasons and falls in love. It was light and charming and I read it in a day. Really sweet read.
April 3, 2017
This book just never grabbed me. It’s a fluff book, which is fine, but the plot still needs to hang together and the characters still need to be likable and to behave in realistic ways in order for me to enjoy it. I liked the heroine, Carrie, well enough. She was nice and relatable, despite being raised as a princess, and didn’t show any snobby or TSTL characteristics that you so often see with romance novel heroines. So that was good, at least.
However the rest of the book just didn’t work for me. For starters, I didn’t connect with Daniel’s character at all. It felt like the author couldn’t “see” him nearly as well as she could Carrie. His personality was a weird mish mash of contradicting traits and motivations that made him seem at varying times stupid, heartless and weak. And yet at the same time Carrie was gushing about what a fantastic man he was. It didn’t jive.
No matter how many times the author went over how Daniel was an absentee father until his almost ex-wife died unexpectedly, I still didn't believe any functioning adult could be THAT clueless about how to interact with his own child. I mean, is there anyone alive who doesn’t realize that a little girl’s make-believe tea party does not involve real tea? Come on, nobody’s that dumb. And not wanting to put on the girlie scarf she gave him to wear at the tea party because he thought it was embarrassing…in the privacy of his own home? Dude get the stick out of your butt! Things like that happen all throughout the book and Daniel actually has to fight to overcome his embarrassment in order to do right by his daughter. It makes him look like a self-involved prick rather than a lonely widower who desperately loves his child. The book constantly tries to make out like Daniel has a good heart and really wants to do the right thing, but just doesn’t know what the right thing is. But all the actual interactions between father and daughter show that the problem wasn’t his lack of parenting knowledge, but his own selfish desire to keep being the jerk he’d been prior to his wife’s death.
The same issues were present when it came to his job. He complained constantly about how working for the tabloid TV station went against everything he believed in as a journalist…but when push came to shove, he actually had a lot of things in common with that line of work. When he found out some scandalous information about Carrie, he actually had a really, really hard time deciding not to use it to ruin her life. This is a woman he’s made out with, introduced to his daughter, and assured she could trust him completely. And this was still a tough decision for him? Wow, what a heartless snake. And he even continues to “wrestle” with this decision after everyone in the story whom he claims to care about has told him that people are more important than “the story.” His mother tells him about how his father ruined some poor, innocent man’s life by being so driven to publish “the story” that he didn’t adequately check his facts. The man committed suicide as a direct result and Daniel’s father never recovered. Daniel listens to this story and then goes right back to trying to decide whether or not he should ruin Carrie’s life as if it had no impact on him whatsoever. He even goes to talk to Carrie and he a) doesn’t clue her in to the scandalous info he’s found, and b) sits there while she goes on and on about how he’s such a good man and she trusts him implicitly…and he leaves and still can’t decide whether or not to screw her over. Are you kidding me? This guy is a monster.
And such a hypocrite too. He constantly threw stones at his tabloid boss’s heartless drive to get ratings at all costs, but then in practically the next sentence he talks about how his Pulitzer prize-winning father also drummed it into his brain that journalism was all about the endless quest for ratings. And when he found out Carrie’s scandalous secret, he freely admitted that the “old” him would have been foaming at the mouth to splash it across the headlines. So how exactly is he any different from his new tabloid employers? He’s not. He just considers himself to be better than everyone else. That HIS drive for ratings is some how nobler than his boss's when the end result is exactly the same.
Quite frankly, I didn’t sympathize with Daniel’s situation at all. He didn’t even actually seem to like his career as a journalist very much, because he spoke several times about how he’d been “expected” to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps so that’s why he’d chosen the profession. But despite not caring about the job, and having lived through a childhood of having an absentee father who cared more about the next headline than his own child, Daniel still did the exact same thing to his own wife and daughter. His wife was in the process of divorcing him when she died, which led to him suddenly being forced to be a parent to his daughter. If the wife had lived and the divorce finalized, he would have continued in his jet-setting career and probably only seen his daughter once or twice a year, if he could be bothered. This is not hero material people.
It would have been one thing if his wife’s death had be a true wake-up call for him and he’d abandoned all his callous, jerk ways, but he hasn’t. He’s still pretty much that guy for 99% of the book. He acts like he HAS to stay at this tabloid job that he hates in order to provide for his daughter, but that’s not true. There are other professions in the world besides journalism. He didn’t even try to find a different line of work. A hero is supposed to someone who is strong enough to stand by their principles, even when the going gets tough. If he truly felt that the tabloid job went against all his beliefs then he shouldn’t have been working there. The fact that he chose to work there and just sit around whining about it all the time made him come across as weak. I also didn’t like that he deliberately used his daughter to get close to Carrie in the beginning with the full intention of proving her to be an impostor. Exploiting his innocent daughter for such nefarious purposes is just slimy, not to mention wrong.
And I didn’t really feel like the ending did enough to redeem him. The way he left his notes of Carrie’s scandalous secret just lying around for someone else to find was completely idiotic. The book talks over and over about how great a journalist he was and how he’d won awards and so forth…and yet he’s too stupid to take precautions with sensitive information? GTFOOH! Not to mention that he didn’t actually have any proof that his information was correct. He got the 20-year-old opinion of a retired reporter and decided it must be the truth without any corroborating evidence whatsoever. Is that really the kind of journalistic research that won him awards in the past? Please. And his method of apologizing to Carrie was pretty weak. He breaks down into tears about how tough his life has been the last year so that SHE ends up comforting HIM. Everything was about poor Daniel and his raw deal in life when 99.9% of his problems were self-inflicted. He was just lame all the way around.
Aside from the highly disappointing hero, there were multiple places where the plot just didn’t make sense. First of all, the “secret” in the story was telegraphed so hard that a child could figure it out very early on, but Carrie was totally oblivious until it literally walked right up to her. Then, after she finds it out she….does nothing. She doesn’t call her parents to see if it’s actually true, nothing. That’s totally unbelievable. Instead she goes to the interview at Daniel’s tabloid TV station. Why on earth would she do that after receiving some personally devastating news? At the very least she could have called and said she was sick. This interview wasn’t SO important that she needed to do it at all costs.
The titular “princess test” Daniel and Carrie dreamed up for the interview was kept secret the whole book like it was going to be some big reveal but when it was revealed it was the most boring and least TV-appropriate “test” you can imagine that wouldn’t prove a darn thing with regards to Carrie’s claims of being a princess.
Then Daniel’s “evil” boss spills the beans on Carrie’s newly discovered secret and Carrie is so shocked that she inadvertently confirms it before running off stage. Then she goes home and FINALLY calls her parents to verify that it’s true….but doesn’t warn them of the media frenzy that’s about to descend on them?? That makes no sense at all! Heck, they’re royalty; they might have been able to stop the show from ever airing if she’d given them a proper heads-up. But she waits a whole other day, and until the show’s is due to air in just a few hours, before finally calling her father. His reaction to the impending scandal was also unbelievable. He acted like it was no big deal, and might even be good for the entire kingdom to know that He says people will see that "even a queen can make mistakes." Yeah no. People wouldn’t just shrug their shoulders and say “we all mess up sometimes.” They’d rip Carrie and her mother to shreds. His reaction to this news should have been one of support. A “we’ll weather this storm together because we’re a family and we love each other,” reaction, not one of total dismissal. It’s just not realistic for him to have been so cavalier about the whole thing.
So in summary, I hated Daniel, the plot didn’t work for me and none of the characters behaved in appropriate or believable ways.
However the rest of the book just didn’t work for me. For starters, I didn’t connect with Daniel’s character at all. It felt like the author couldn’t “see” him nearly as well as she could Carrie. His personality was a weird mish mash of contradicting traits and motivations that made him seem at varying times stupid, heartless and weak. And yet at the same time Carrie was gushing about what a fantastic man he was. It didn’t jive.
No matter how many times the author went over how Daniel was an absentee father until his almost ex-wife died unexpectedly, I still didn't believe any functioning adult could be THAT clueless about how to interact with his own child. I mean, is there anyone alive who doesn’t realize that a little girl’s make-believe tea party does not involve real tea? Come on, nobody’s that dumb. And not wanting to put on the girlie scarf she gave him to wear at the tea party because he thought it was embarrassing…in the privacy of his own home? Dude get the stick out of your butt! Things like that happen all throughout the book and Daniel actually has to fight to overcome his embarrassment in order to do right by his daughter. It makes him look like a self-involved prick rather than a lonely widower who desperately loves his child. The book constantly tries to make out like Daniel has a good heart and really wants to do the right thing, but just doesn’t know what the right thing is. But all the actual interactions between father and daughter show that the problem wasn’t his lack of parenting knowledge, but his own selfish desire to keep being the jerk he’d been prior to his wife’s death.
The same issues were present when it came to his job. He complained constantly about how working for the tabloid TV station went against everything he believed in as a journalist…but when push came to shove, he actually had a lot of things in common with that line of work. When he found out some scandalous information about Carrie, he actually had a really, really hard time deciding not to use it to ruin her life. This is a woman he’s made out with, introduced to his daughter, and assured she could trust him completely. And this was still a tough decision for him? Wow, what a heartless snake. And he even continues to “wrestle” with this decision after everyone in the story whom he claims to care about has told him that people are more important than “the story.” His mother tells him about how his father ruined some poor, innocent man’s life by being so driven to publish “the story” that he didn’t adequately check his facts. The man committed suicide as a direct result and Daniel’s father never recovered. Daniel listens to this story and then goes right back to trying to decide whether or not he should ruin Carrie’s life as if it had no impact on him whatsoever. He even goes to talk to Carrie and he a) doesn’t clue her in to the scandalous info he’s found, and b) sits there while she goes on and on about how he’s such a good man and she trusts him implicitly…and he leaves and still can’t decide whether or not to screw her over. Are you kidding me? This guy is a monster.
And such a hypocrite too. He constantly threw stones at his tabloid boss’s heartless drive to get ratings at all costs, but then in practically the next sentence he talks about how his Pulitzer prize-winning father also drummed it into his brain that journalism was all about the endless quest for ratings. And when he found out Carrie’s scandalous secret, he freely admitted that the “old” him would have been foaming at the mouth to splash it across the headlines. So how exactly is he any different from his new tabloid employers? He’s not. He just considers himself to be better than everyone else. That HIS drive for ratings is some how nobler than his boss's when the end result is exactly the same.
Quite frankly, I didn’t sympathize with Daniel’s situation at all. He didn’t even actually seem to like his career as a journalist very much, because he spoke several times about how he’d been “expected” to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps so that’s why he’d chosen the profession. But despite not caring about the job, and having lived through a childhood of having an absentee father who cared more about the next headline than his own child, Daniel still did the exact same thing to his own wife and daughter. His wife was in the process of divorcing him when she died, which led to him suddenly being forced to be a parent to his daughter. If the wife had lived and the divorce finalized, he would have continued in his jet-setting career and probably only seen his daughter once or twice a year, if he could be bothered. This is not hero material people.
It would have been one thing if his wife’s death had be a true wake-up call for him and he’d abandoned all his callous, jerk ways, but he hasn’t. He’s still pretty much that guy for 99% of the book. He acts like he HAS to stay at this tabloid job that he hates in order to provide for his daughter, but that’s not true. There are other professions in the world besides journalism. He didn’t even try to find a different line of work. A hero is supposed to someone who is strong enough to stand by their principles, even when the going gets tough. If he truly felt that the tabloid job went against all his beliefs then he shouldn’t have been working there. The fact that he chose to work there and just sit around whining about it all the time made him come across as weak. I also didn’t like that he deliberately used his daughter to get close to Carrie in the beginning with the full intention of proving her to be an impostor. Exploiting his innocent daughter for such nefarious purposes is just slimy, not to mention wrong.
And I didn’t really feel like the ending did enough to redeem him. The way he left his notes of Carrie’s scandalous secret just lying around for someone else to find was completely idiotic. The book talks over and over about how great a journalist he was and how he’d won awards and so forth…and yet he’s too stupid to take precautions with sensitive information? GTFOOH! Not to mention that he didn’t actually have any proof that his information was correct. He got the 20-year-old opinion of a retired reporter and decided it must be the truth without any corroborating evidence whatsoever. Is that really the kind of journalistic research that won him awards in the past? Please. And his method of apologizing to Carrie was pretty weak. He breaks down into tears about how tough his life has been the last year so that SHE ends up comforting HIM. Everything was about poor Daniel and his raw deal in life when 99.9% of his problems were self-inflicted. He was just lame all the way around.
Aside from the highly disappointing hero, there were multiple places where the plot just didn’t make sense. First of all, the “secret” in the story was telegraphed so hard that a child could figure it out very early on, but Carrie was totally oblivious until it literally walked right up to her. Then, after she finds it out she….does nothing. She doesn’t call her parents to see if it’s actually true, nothing. That’s totally unbelievable. Instead she goes to the interview at Daniel’s tabloid TV station. Why on earth would she do that after receiving some personally devastating news? At the very least she could have called and said she was sick. This interview wasn’t SO important that she needed to do it at all costs.
The titular “princess test” Daniel and Carrie dreamed up for the interview was kept secret the whole book like it was going to be some big reveal but when it was revealed it was the most boring and least TV-appropriate “test” you can imagine that wouldn’t prove a darn thing with regards to Carrie’s claims of being a princess.
Then Daniel’s “evil” boss spills the beans on Carrie’s newly discovered secret and Carrie is so shocked that she inadvertently confirms it before running off stage. Then she goes home and FINALLY calls her parents to verify that it’s true….but doesn’t warn them of the media frenzy that’s about to descend on them?? That makes no sense at all! Heck, they’re royalty; they might have been able to stop the show from ever airing if she’d given them a proper heads-up. But she waits a whole other day, and until the show’s is due to air in just a few hours, before finally calling her father. His reaction to the impending scandal was also unbelievable. He acted like it was no big deal, and might even be good for the entire kingdom to know that He says people will see that "even a queen can make mistakes." Yeah no. People wouldn’t just shrug their shoulders and say “we all mess up sometimes.” They’d rip Carrie and her mother to shreds. His reaction to this news should have been one of support. A “we’ll weather this storm together because we’re a family and we love each other,” reaction, not one of total dismissal. It’s just not realistic for him to have been so cavalier about the whole thing.
So in summary, I hated Daniel, the plot didn’t work for me and none of the characters behaved in appropriate or believable ways.
July 10, 2012
The title of the book caught my interest that's why I bought it. I love the twist and the characters of the story especially Daniel's baby---Annabelle. I found her cute and adorable. She reminds me of my favorite character in one of the novel I wrote.
February 3, 2014
A darling book! So perfect to curl up. It was a quick read but in no way short on heart. If you're looking for a sweet romance between two characters you root for you can't go wrong with this modern fairy tale by Shirley Jump!
June 3, 2020
Me gustó mucho porque fue como un medio de proyección especialmente en momentos en que la llamaban "Carlita". Fue encantador.
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December 24, 2014Miniseries: Once Upon a Kiss…
Category: Classic Romance
Category: Classic Romance
Read
December 24, 2014Miniseries: Once Upon a Kiss…
Category: Classic Romance
Category: Classic Romance
Read
October 9, 2011It was okay.
March 31, 2014
eh... not horrible, not fabulous... didn't really hold my attention. Potential, yes. Delivery was quaint but fairytale short.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews