Her Royal Highness

HER ROYAL HIGHNESS is a spin-off of Rachel Hawkins’s previous YA novel, ROYALS. It follows a brand new protagonist, Millie, a high school student from Texas. Millie has been in an undefined relationship with Jude, one of her best friends, since the beginning of the summer. However, just when Millie thinks the relationship might be official, she catches Jude kissing her ex-boyfriend. Millie is upset, but this is what pushes her to decide to spend her final year of high school in a boarding school in Scotland. It’s not just any boarding school, though, it’s a boarding school known for educating Scotland’s richest kids, including the children of the royal family.

When Millie arrives in Scotland, she learns quickly that her roommate is the country’s own Princess Flora. Flora gorgeous, but she’s also obnoxious and rude. Millie doesn’t like her at first, but they slowly get close as the book goes on. Readers of ROYALS will remember Princess Flora from her few scenes in that book, but it is nice to see Rachel Hawkins fully develop Flora in this one. There are a lot of other cameos from ROYALS in this book that readers will enjoy if they read that book.

Millie isn’t quite as snarky as Daisy, the main character in ROYALS, but she is very unique in her own way. One of the best parts of Millie’s character is her obsession with rocks. She is a wannabe geologist that knows everything there is to know about rocks and keeps a collection of them. One of her reasons for wanting to go to Scotland so badly is all of the beautiful rocks the country is known for.

Millie’s relationship with Princess Flora is absolutely adorable. There are so many stories of average boys and girls falling for a prince or princess of the opposite sex. However, there are very few books, especially in the YA genre, where an average girl falls in love with a princess. This is a huge step forward for LGBTQ+ young adult literature.

While there are some ROYALS Easter eggs in this book, you don’t have to have read the previous book to read this one. It’s fast-paced, cutesy, and entertaining in all of the best ways. It also makes great use of the enemies-to-lovers and boarding school book tropes. For teens who love a good contemporary romance, this is the perfect book to add to a summer reading list.