Eleanor is a princess and knows what she wants, to go to Rosewood School but it's at first against her parents approval until she wins them round.

Lottie is a girl from St Ives who's also heading for Rosewood after losing her mother but keeping alive her princess like thoughts and attitude.

When Ellie meets roommate Lottie she's amused where as Lottie takes a dislike to her new roomie after she shows she doesn't respect her or her belongings, it's clear they're opposites and will have to work through their issues.

This later involves Lottie taking the place of Ellie as she desires a normal life and not the forced one of being a princess!

Then Jamie, Ellie's childhood friend shows up to fins out what exactly is going on as reports fly that the princess isn't his friend Ellie but a stranger.

With boys and balls as well as royal duties including princess lessons, the girls could never have imagined their lives becoming the way they have or forming quite such a unique bond.

This book was a really great and anticipated read, as a follower of Connie's online platforms I expected this to be a Disney style tale and wasn't disappointed at all. A modern twist to the tale and being set around a boarding school added to the delight as the two main girls were forced into a strange bond which created tension, drama and lots of fun for us to read about. I got absorbed into the book and couldn't put it down it felt like I was there watching all the drama happening!

Many thanks to the publishers for allowing me to review this book for them!

A great YA novel of fairytales and cunning. Lottie is the first student in years to get into Rosewood on a scholarship, when she finds she is rooming with Ellie, the complete opposite to her kind warm personality. Ellie and Mottie become firm friends with her becoming Ellie's Portman. A story with lots of twists and turns, I look forward to reading the second book in the series.

I really enjoyed this book,  I was pleasantly suprised. As I started reading it,  I wasn't too sure what to make of it,  I love ya stories but I was wondering is this perhaps too Ya for me...... But alas no I throughly enjoyed it,  it was a tiny bit predictable at the end but the story was good, the characters well rounded and I loved the undertow of something supernatural happening at rosewood and I am truly excited to read the second book in the rosewood chronicles.

IN SUMMARY: UNDERCOVER PRINCESS is a fun, adventurous tale with charming main characters and an intriguing mystery. Its downfall is the underdeveloped supporting cast, juvenile prose, poor world-building and contrived plot.

MY THOUGHTS:

I’m an absolute sucker for preppy boarding school mystery stories, so when I heard Glynn was writing THE ROSEWOOD CHRONICLES, I was hype immediately. I’ll preface this by saying I don’t religiously watch Glynn’s videos, but I do enjoy her content occasionally, and I was still hoping for this book to be a juicy read.

There’s a lot of heart, and the main trio are adorable, funny and charming in their own way. Lottie and Ellie have such a sweet friendship, and it’s a real driving force behind their shenanigans at the school.

I loved Rosewood Hall. I thought it was wondrous and magical in its own way. The secret passages, the houses, the lore; it was easy to be swept by it, and it gave me Harry Potter vibes. The descriptions are lavish and rich, and help you visualise the school well. Slightly disappointed it wasn’t featured more, if I’m honest.

However, the voice is juvenile, unpractised and clunky. Very tell, not show, in places where showing would be more appropriate than telling. The prose is stilted with “Lottie did this. Jamie did that. Lottie felt this”. Adverbs are rampant when there is usually a better verb that could capture the emotion of the speaker more efficiently. Dialogue is jarring with amateur mistakes like spamming capslock for entire spoken sentences, or restating people’s names over and over again. Inconsistency in use of British or American spellings. Incorrect grammar. Characters often overreacted and it made melodrama more than good conflict.

Some parts are just all out weird, like the intimacy between Lottie and Ellie. It’s fine if they're love interests to one another, but the narrative glosses over it entirely. They act like this behaviour is normal when… it’s not…?

The plot is confusing and incoherent. Most plot-relevant situations had me more bewildered than intrigued, because there was no meatier explanation to bridge the gap between how they figured things out.

In addition, plot points are contrived, convenient and lack foreshadowing, particularly the puzzles. They weren’t at all relevant to the overarching plot, so reading about them felt tedious more than exciting.

Other plot conveniences include: randomly figuring out problems; characters being interrupted before saying something possibly plot-important; a workshop being held at Rosewood, rather than literally anywhere else in the world; bumping into someone and all their things falling out from her bag.

The climax, as such, was a total disappointment. Sure, it was intense, but it lacked coherence. I didn’t fear the villain because the explanation behind their villainy was flimsy, and they made ‘amateur villain’ mistakes.
I think the problem with some parts was the ‘magic’ wasn’t explained well, or at all, really. This book is set in the contemporary world, which is why explanations of ‘magic’ are necessary as to not confuse the reader and think it’s some sort of delusion on part of the protagonist.

Likewise, the world-building of Maradova is poor. We have no idea where it is, except somewhere up north near Russia. Fair enough, they keep English as a language, but why wouldn’t Maradovans have their own accents, their own culture or traditions? At the moment, the country is utterly indistinguishable from England, and both Ellie and Jamie act exactly the same way that Lottie does, despite being from two different countries between them. It unfortunately seemed like a lazy world-building shortcut.

For some reason, there’s an actual maths problem in the book. I understand its relevance, but it’s a waste of words when most, if not all, readers will skip over it (including myself).

Most of the supporting cast are unnecessary and underdeveloped. There’s heads of year, sports captains and teacher’s assistants that are all named but have literally zero relevance, so them being named is pointless. The teachers’ descriptions are all info-dumped in one go and it makes them forgettable. Lola and Micky could be mushed to create one character or removed entirely and nothing would change. Raphael, Saskia and Edmund are infuriatingly underdeveloped.

Binah, Anastacia, Ellie and Jamie are the only three-dimensional characters, and even they lack coherent descriptions of their appearance. Jamie is at least half-, if not full, Pakistani and it’s not mentioned until near the end of the book, by which point, the reader already has a mental image of him that is difficult to uproot. All it would take is Lottie to think “He had brown skin, possibly from Pakistan” or something.

Even Lottie herself is poorly described; it was at least twenty chapters before I learnt what colour hair she had. I don’t have a clue what she looks like, still, which I think is apparently the point, but readers need some grounding for characters descriptions.

Lottie made some stupid character decisions that made her more annoying than endearing. Lottie made questionable decisions that made me rolled my eyes.

Also, the only confirmed black character smokes, swears and encourages trouble. Also, using food words to describe skin colours is yikes.

WILL I READ ON? It’ll really depend on the summary for the next one. This is a clumsy opening of a series and it doesn’t give me much hype for the next one.

Will I recommend this book to my students - definitely.  I'll also be eagerly awaiting the rest of the Rosewood Chronicles series, as Undercover Princess combines many features I enjoy.  It could be shelved next to the Harry Potter, Princess Diaries and even Divergent series, as it features a fairytale, boarding school, royal setting with intrigue, danger and strong characters discovering who they really are underneath the various labels society and their school gives them.  I read it in a few hours because I genuinely couldn't put it down, and hope my students will feel the same!

'Undercover Princess' is the first book in Rosewood Chronicles. It's a novel about an unlikely friendship between a real princess (Ellie) and a girl who loves fairy tales (Lottie). They both meet in a prestigious (and a bit magical) boarding school in England. But even though it's a book about princesses, princes and kingdoms it's definitely not what you would expect. 'Undercover Princess' surprises you with suspenceful turns of action and scenes of danger. The book is highly focused on emotions connected with friendship, loyalty and loss. I give it five starts for the great approach towards the topic of outstanding morals, immaculate behaviour, but also for focusing on being brave version of yourself. Beware that there are also some swooning moments thanks to Jamie who is a total gent. I highly recommend to all age groups of readers!

I almost felt like I was somewhere I shouldn't be reading and reviewing this book as I am way out of the target audience by, ummmm, well more than a few years! But I don't care! It was really great!

My 6 highlights from Undercover Princess:

Lottie and Ellie's friendship and bond, beautiful to witness firsthand,

School setting...it's like I was there!

The message this book gives, lets actually support each other, 

Plot twists, never saw them coming!

The mystery! Who doesn't love a mystery?!

How hard it made me think of what will happen next for this series.


This was like a breath of fresh air to read. Fantastic writing, fantastic story and I am hoping we see a little bit of romance in book 2, Lottie deserves it!!!

I intend to expand on / improve this review before cross-posting it to my blog in the near future, but this is the version currently on Goodreads.

Ehhh. This was probably a 2.5* read. The plot was plenty enjoyable: mistaken identities, friendship, secrecy and mysterious fictional kingdoms all combined in a boarding school setting. The characters, too, were interesting enough, although I might have liked to see more of Lottie's backstory before she came to the school because that seemed to drive her a lot. But the writing felt... weak. This was exacerbated by the fact that the eARC still seemed to have a bunch of editorial notes in there, occasionally emphasising errors I might not have noticed otherwise. But even without that, the writing style was disappointingly simplistic and felt like it needed a lot more work to be convincing.

Although there were some background queer characters (and I'm fairly sure Ellie is meant to be gay, but it hasn't been discussed on-page yet), it felt like the narrative between Lottie and Ellie was veering strongly into "no homo" territory, which was a shame, as their relationship felt easily like it could have drifted into romance -- and that would have avoided a couple of irritating sideplots involving men. There was also a minor plot reveal that, as well as seeming kind of pointless because it didn't go anywhere, bothered me somewhat (I won't go into details because spoilers, but there was a strange implication of a character being trans that just kind of felt... insensitive).

Mainly, though, it was the writing that let this down. The concept was fine, but the execution let it down and I felt it could've used more editing. Then again, since the ARC I read still seemed to have edit notes in it, it's possible there's work to be done before it's published.

When I first heard about this novel, I was excited about the storyline as it sounded like something I would have loved to read when I was younger. After finishing this book, I was certainly right; I probably would have loved to read this book when I was around the age of 12-15. On the surface, this book is a cute, fluffy, sugary piece of writing but underneath I think the author had good intentions about this novel. The two main characters who I think are so cute, bring out the best in each other and they are such lovely friends. Overall, I believe that this is a great debut novel from Connie, and I look forward to seeing more from her.

An amazing book from Connie Glynn. Princesses, balls and princes but not in the usual way. Lottie and Ellie arrive at Rosewood School in a shroud of mystery. A princess is amongst the students but who is she?? And who is threatening her? A gripping and intriguing book with twists and turn along the way. Can't wait for the sequel

Lighthearted and good fun to read with serious messages woven throughout this YA novel. I'd like to know what happens next to the characters and plan to read the rest of the series.

I wanted to read "Undercover Princess" because the concept reminded me of various well loved stories from my childhood ("The Princess Diaries", "The Parent Trap", "The Princess and the Pauper", even a little of "Harry Potter") and although this story was different from these ones I'd read before, it felt familiar, like a fairytale that the rest of my family would be familiar with if I mentioned I was reading it.

A knowledge of the author Connie, her life and the things she likes helped along this feeling of familiarity as I could see her inspiration behind certain elements and even the names of some of the things she'd created (there's a very clever Star Wars reference that blends well into the story!) Despite this, the story will make sense even to somebody who has not heard of Connie before and although a reader may not understand all the references right away, they may enjoy finding these Easter Eggs in future.

The feeling of familiarity began to stray as I reached the end of the book and I realised my fear that the Rosewood Chronicles would run out of interesting plots in the sequels to follow was very much unfounded. The story takes a turn that makes the book as a whole difficult to compare to anything I've read before and now I can't wait to see what's next for Lottie and her friends.

This is a fluffy princess story (and there's nothing wrong with that!) but it's also a story that will spark conversations and opinions in your head that apply to real issues in the world. A stunning debut that will leave you wanting more.

Entertaining & original. An aura of magical mystery throughout with an imaginative plot & plenty to keep you engrossed

I loved it. It has a bit of a Princess Diaries vibe about it and could half expect Anne to play Lottie if this had been around at the same time as the Princess Diaries books/films. 
Some bits I had to re-read as I wasn't sure who was speaking but thankfully it was only 2 or 3 times in the whole book.

I went into this expecting a light easy read, and was surprised at how much I enjoyed this. The book does a wonderful job of exploring the characters friendships, motivations and histories: I will be keeping an eye out for more in this series

Lottie has wanted nothing more since she was a child than to attend Rosewood High. Rosewood is a prestigious high school usually attended by princes, princesses and other children from influential families. When she manages to work her way to a scholarship at the school, Lottie has no that her life is going to change forever

I am an active reader of YA novels, but honestly while reading the first few chapters I did have a moment where I felt like this book really was aimed at younger children/teens and I felt too old to be reading it. However, that changed as I got further through the book. It starts off all teen-sy and young but develops into characters that have to be much older than they actually are. We follow Lottie, at 14 years old, starting at a prestigious high school and finding out she is sharing a room with an actual princess. At the beginning, Lottie is young, naive and seemingly not cut out for life at Rosewood High yet by the end she seems to have aged beyond her years (even though she hasn't actually gotten any older). Enter Jamie, the new boy. You know the type, good looking, good at everything they do - but is he really just a normal student. Lottie intends to find out.

Whilst I did have reservations about this book, I did love it by the end and would love to be able to read the second book when it is released.

This is a wonderful book. I think the Rosewood Chronicles have the potential to become very popular. There are no witches, wizards or strange creatures but there are secrets, betrayals, royalty and genuine friendships in the making.
Thankfully there is no cliffhanger; just the knowledge that there is more to come.

Undercover Princess is a fantastic start to a new series. The two main Characters, Ellie and Lottie, are so well drawn I feel like I know them in real life, and the descriptions of the school and palace were so vivid I could easily picture them in front of me. I love the mystery ... can't say any more about that, of course! ... and the ending was satisfying while still leaving room for the next book.

I really enjoyed this and I'll be looking out for the next one. Thanks for the chance to read it.

Firstly, thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House UK Children’s for allowing me to read this wonderful book before publication.

The second I saw the cover of this book I absolutely knew I had to read it. The cover seriously has a WOW factor! Connie really did bring all the characters to life me and was unbelievably beautiful. The bond that grows between Lottie and Ellie is wonderful and together they truly are unstoppable.

This book has a little bit of everything, friendship, suspense, mystery, and for Lottie it’s about finding somewhere you belong and something you can believe in. There are twists that you never saw coming (I didn’t anyway). There is also going to be some romance coming in the next installment as well I reckon.

Connie brought Rosewood Hall to life, it has been described in way that you can actually imagine yourself there.

I don’t think I can recommend this book enough without giving away spoilers. If you ever get the chance to read it, then do. This book for me has a very well deserved 5/5 rating.

I went into this expecting a light frothy read. Thankfully, it was not at all what I expected. This is a series that has potential to go to some very dark places!