This is book 2 of Jim Doran’s Kingdom Come Series – you can read my review on book 1 here. Jim and I initially became pals because of the similarities between his fairytale kingdom and my world of Novel. If people like the idea of my Don’t Marry the Cursed, but want something for a younger audience, I recommend Kingdom Come.

Can you skip book 1?

It’s been over two years since I read the first book, so I’d forgotten most of the details of the first book, but was nicely reminded of events, characters, and characteristics through On Earth As It Is. Still, if you skip ahead to this one, you’ll be playing a lot of “catch up” as each fairytale princess has a unique magical power that’s explained more in book 1, and much more happened in book 1 than the simple fairytales.

Considering that, please read book 1 (which I recommend for any fairytale lovers) before jumping into this review for book 2, because SPOILERS AHEAD.

What you need to know from book 1:

To use an anime term, the first book is an isekai: a modern teenage boy is transported to the fairy tale world to find and help fairy tale princesses through their stories. We meet Cinderella, Snow White, Valencia (The Little Match Girl), Helga, and Penta. I loved how he used some common and some less-common stories and twisted them just enough to make them unpredictable. To separate them a little more from the typical fairytale, each princess has a magical ability. In brief: Penta teleports, Cinderella can persuade, Helga cures curses (and has awesome fighting skills), Snow White can’t be killed by weapons, and Valencia is lucky.

Also, Harold fell madly in love with a pixie named Planet. She was killed by a demon king (I warned you, SPOILERS!), but he found her doppelganger on Earth named Sondra and dated her.

On to Book 2!

For On Earth As It Is, I laughed a little at the similarities to my Dreaming Princesses series (he wrote his first). The five queens have gone missing and Harold is tasked with contacting five Earthly look-alikes to go to Kingdom and play their parts until they’re found and returned. They might look similar, but…
Snow White’s Sylvia is a social worker going up against a mafia,
Valencia’s Virginia is willing to steal for the money to keep her small shop running,
Helga’s Hildy is a cop who relies too much on her gun,
Cinderella’s Charley is a fantasy fanatic who thinks she can speak elfish, and
Penta’s Paisley is a wife and mother of two kids.

Pretending to be magical queens isn’t easy, even with personal guards and tutors. Harold accompanies them to Kingdom, but has his own adventure to find their way home.

Meanwhile, the queens of Kingdom arrive on Earth and must pretend to be their Earthly look-alikes (and there are the fun similarities with my Dreaming Princesses).

Overall

There are well-presented themes on relationship struggles and fate vs. choice, but I especially loved how the characters developed.

While I enjoyed book 1, I could see how Mr. Doran grew as a writer, strengthening his story-telling skills. The pacing was great and kept me wanting more.

Cleanliness

The romance is sweet, and the violence is mild, but there is a gang fight (including a few other fun battle scenes) and a main character death to increase the tension. There’s also some swearing, but mostly replacement words (2-3 A’s, B’s, and S’s, but lots of “cats-p*ss”). Fine for a 13 year-old by film standards.

Final Rating

I love culture clashes and this book is FULL of them. We get a wide variety of characters with differing reactions to teleporting from our modern world to a fairytale renaissance world, AND we get the fairytale queens we love from “Kingdom Come” teleporting and reacting to our crazy world.
I loved how the characters and relationships developed. Great romances, fun fight scenes, and interesting twists. *****4.8 Stars*****

Rating: 5 out of 5.