With lovable characters and an enchanting storyline, That Prince is Mine is a quirky RomCom that quickly leads readers into the joys and trials of falling in love. As a main character, Emma Yoon is both endearing and strong. She has an intense love of family and food and joins together her two passions as a culinary instructor who focuses on teaching her students how to prepare beautifully intricate Korean royal court cuisine. In typical RomCom fashion, the joy that our MC gets from both her career and her personal relationships, with her father and her students, fulfill her in ways that make her life feel complete. Until she meets Michael Aubert, a captivating guest professor at USC.
The tension between Emma and Michael is palpable from the beginning and brilliantly written. They have an easy banter that grows as they get to know one another. Problems arise for the two of them quickly as Emma’s desire to stay away from love comes to blows with Michaels insistence that true love is alive and present in everything the two of them do together.
While the characters themselves were so easy to fall in love with, the reluctance for either party to see the world from the other’s point of view was frustrating after a while. The tension between the two of them was not enough to hold on to the complexity of the plot. Michael is in fact a guest professor at USC, but he is also secretly the prince of a small country. The addition of this secret and the stress that it brings, in addition to the reluctance of Emma to follow her heart led to my own reluctance to finish the book quickly. I know that stubbornness is a feature of many real people, but too much can kill the flow of the book and eventually prevents character growth that would be expected from the genre. While this may break expectations from the genre, it wasn’t a fun way of going about it.
Despite my hesitations about several of the plot lines, it was ultimately a book that gave new meaning to falling in love. From familial obligations to the discrepancies in background and upbringing, Emma and Michael are each surrounded by reasons that they should fall in love. These reasons add to the complexity of the plot in ways that helped drive it forward, but added to the difficulty in pacing.
3.5/5 stars for this darling RomCom
Thank you to Netagalley and St. Martin’s Press for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for my honest review.
The Novel Llama 