The perfect pick for anyone who loves Disney—or even those who don’t! Super cute idea, I definitely recommend picking this one up!

This was moving and nostalgic! Made me think about how much I wanted to go to Disneyland as a kid and what a Disneyland-type island might be like.

This title is a few years old now but it is a favorite. It is Disney adjacent in the way that it is published by Disney and is Disney themed but is NOT a direct Disney canon novel (like, a Princess story). Some of you may be familiar with the Star Wars Starcruiser, a recent failed venture where guests are participants in a Star Wars story set in a hotel…ahem, ship…called the Starcruiser. Happily Ever Island is like if Storybook Canals came to life and participants could live their best princess lives. And by princess I mean their stories – which include side characters and villains. Sounds pretty cool, right? Except like, Cinderella and Snow White did not exactly have the best times with their stepmothers (shout out to Julie Murphy for writing a cool alt to Cindy’s story where Lady Tremaine is not an entire monster). So YAY you can go lose your shoe at midnight and meet the love of your life (for pretend) but first, you have to live with the abuse from your stepsisters and stepmother and clean a bunch of stuff and maybe even take that cold shower with the birds? Suddenly that sounds a whole lot less fun. I love what Crystal did, exploring the real world vibes of living as a Disney princess. Let this be a warning to Disney…Between this story and the Starcruiser…maybe people are best left to experience the magic in the parks and not directly as participants.

I'm a proud Disney adult and I was so excited for this book when I read the synopsis. It was cute, but just missed the mark for me. Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC!

This book felt very targeted towards a specific audience: Disney adults. While I enjoy Disney, I don't have the same obsession level as others, and certain things in this book felt very niche.

This is an absolutely adorable and funny romance book. I love seeing the friendship bloom between the two main characters and I also love how it has two different romances.

UPDATE 06/15/2023: So I went back and finished it... and it wasn't worth it. Madison is one of the most annoying characters in history and an awful friend. Laney needs to work through her issues with her mom and a therapist (which, thankfully, I think she does end up doing). The whole concept is so over the top that I can't suspend my disbelief to enjoy it.

1) While Disney can do a lot of things, they cannot perform the kind of magic found in these pages and it was so stupid to try and pretend they could.
2) Having Val tell Madison "certain classes to take to make sure she got into the DCP" was laughable. I was in media and got into the DCP; one of my coworkers was going into teaching and another was a business major. You can literally do anything, you just have to make sure your resume and application looks good.
3) WHY DID THEY NEVER EXPLAIN LADY TREMAINE'S ACTOR AND WHY SHE GOT OFF ON BEING A B*TCH THE ENTIRE TIME?!?!

I wasted my time so I could tell you not to waste yours by reading this.

ORIGINAL: I got 6% of the way through and DNF’d this one.

I say this as someone who worked for Disney, goes at LEAST once a year, watches all new movies and rewatches all old movies constantly, and will buy any type of Disney merch: within 2 chapters, I was already annoyed with Madison the 18-year old “Disney adult”.

Now this is not to say that I too wouldn’t be over the moon about winning an all inclusive trip to a Disney island, because that couldn’t be further from the truth. But the first 5 pages were just putting as many character names and easter eggs as possible and it was honestly just annoying.

The other thing that bothered me is that one of our main characters is queer (she has a girlfriend, but I’m not sure is she only likes women or is bisexual or what), but the Disney company itself has been donating to people and companies that support the “Don’t Say Gay” bill while this book was being put together. So this felt like a form of fake support from the company (I know that the author may have wanted to include the wlw relationship, and if that’s the case, then I am very okay with this!! But I just don’t like the idea of Disney putting out this book but not backing up any of their LGBTQ workers).

Overall, this book immediately felt super young even though the island they’re going to is supposed to be 18+, which felt like a strange choice to me. Maybe I’ll give this a go some other time, but I already don’t feel like I can enjoy this book.

I'm unsure how I would market this book to students. The main characters are college aged, however the content is pretty immature and the actions are pretty childish. I'm unsure if my students would get into. The fact that it's Disney is a plus, but we have Kingdom Hunters and the Fairy Tales retold series which are pretty popular. I don't think middle schoolers and high schoolers would like this one.

I'm a Disney fanatic, so there may be a bit of bias in this review, but my goodness, I ADORED "Happily Ever Island." Filled to the brim with pixie-dust moments, it delivers a feel-good romance, perfect-for-summer tropical vibes, and only the best Disney-esque puns. If you love any of the golden-age WDAS films, you'll find a lot to love in this book! My only wish is that the Island existed for fans to actually travel to -- it's such a clever concept, and, throughout the 300-or-so pages, I never wanted to leave! This'll become a comfort (re)read for me, for sure.

This was cute and fluffy. I would love to visit the island and I loved all the Disney references. The story seemed to drag in places and some of the characters were a bit over the top.

[ARC provided by NetGalley for an honest review]

I'm a big Disney fan but, this one fell super flat for me.

Two best friends head to a brand new Disney resort that lets vacationers become the characters. Fully immersive, guests stay in lands based on different movies, with cast members playing secondary characters. On paper, this is what so many Disney fans dream of.

An immense amount of suspension of belief is required for this book and I had such a difficult time believing that such a resort could ever run effectively or that it would go the way it does in the book. The characters didn't do much for me and everything felt a little two-dimensional.

3 stars

I thought I was into Disney adult culture, but I'm really not. I'm also really not into stories for Disney adults or kids who want to become Disney adults. Sorry.

I thought that this book was pretty good. I liked that it was told from a dual perspective, as it allowed for me to really learn more about each of the two main characters and their individual storylines.

Thank you for the chance to review this YA Disney book - even if it took me forever to pick it up.

I struggled a bit with this book; while I loved the concept and know many Disney adults who would jump at a chance to have a similar experience, I felt like I was only half invested in the story.

First, I ultimately picked it up on audiobook - and felt the narration was too similar, so it was sometimes hard to keep track of whose point of view I was currently on.

Beyond that, I did enjoy all the Disney references, a look at "backstage" and how the relationships developed.

I guess I missed the part where this was an immersive Disney story. I like Disney well enough, but this was not written for a casual Disney fan. It just didn't work for me.

Happily Ever Island is a great book to take away our stereotypical thinking ways of the LGBTQ+ community. Lanie and Madison are up for an adventure after Madison and her girlfriend break up. Now I thought these two would become friends to lovers, but no!!! This is where our stereotypical views got in the way. Lanie has a pixie hair cut and dressed a certain, while Madison was super girly girl and was part of the LGBTQ+ community. Throughout the book there are a lot of themes around Disney, from the characters to the actually movies. This was a fun novel that I will add to our library for our children to enjoy.

Madison and Lanie are Disney loving best friends who visit for a test run of Happily Ever Island. Their trip will bring them closer together, despite some bumps in the road, while also giving them a chance at their own magical love story. A cute, fun romp in a place most people would love to visit. If you're a fan of Disney magic and loved Austenland, then this is definitely a book for you.

I'm going to make people mad, but there's really no other way to say this except to say it: this is a book only white people can love. It is the whitest shit I have ever seen. It is excruciatingly, violently white American, and it's not self-aware enough to poke fun at itself or have fun. It's just painful. I made it to 52% while on an airplane and the next day when I tried to give it the ol' college try and make it to the end, I just couldn't do it.

Everything you could ever hate about Disney adults--particularly the fact that they don't act like mature adults and that they have the intellectual imagination and curiosity of a toothpick--is here.

It's obvious from the concept, content, and copyright that this is IP, and I thought I was here for it, because it's a fun concept. But the prose is trying so fucking hard to be cutesy and chatty while also putting in what seems to be a required one IP mention per paragraph that you can't even enjoy a silly but fun concept because it's mishandled by an incompetent writer. This looks far too much like how I wrote stories in middle school--exclamation points galore, and reading more like an endless self-insert fanfic without a structure or a planned ending than a contained story. And as a middle schooler, I had a better grasp of mechanics than this author, a supposed adult. I'll grant that I had an ARC and that it's technically possible (though unlikely given the publishing industry) that all the myriad typos and sloppy grammar and writing were fixed before pub, but they're present in the copy that I read, and it was really annoying.

For somewhere so magical, the descriptions were really weak, so it was hard to imagine anything. This book really relies on its readership being Disney adults who can fill in the blanks.

Everything here is a cliche, and none of those cliches are turned on their head or critiqued or anything, they're just there because that was apparently all the various parties involved in this project could come up with creatively. Nobody talks like a real person, but nor do they talk in some sort of stylized way that might make sense for such a strange setting. It's just badly written. And it just has this painfully earnest liberal white lady attempts at diversity, like describing Beautiful Black Skin or "a nice Latinx couple," which I guess are just growing pains in this generation of fiction but I still want to point them out because they stick out like a sore thumb in a novel that is nothing but trademarks dropped left and right and painfully forced bits of plot or characterization out of a box of stock characters.

I think it's telling, too, that in making it 52% of the way through this book, I got not even a hint of something odd going on, so there's also a problem with pacing. I kept reading because I assumed there would be either some dark or funny-dark underbelly to such a dreamy place, but in all that reading I didn't even get an inkling of it. Maybe it would have been on the next page? Maybe never? I'll never know, because I will absolutely not be giving this book more of my time.

This book is basically every Disney lover’s dream. It’s a cute, low stakes contemporary book, without a super engaging plot but cute nonetheless. Not usually my kind of book but of course this was the exception because DISNEY. That’s why I really only recommend this to Disney fans!

"When did celebrating the things you love becomes childish? Was I supposed to switch off my whimsy the day I became a legal adult?"

If you're looking for a fun, lighthearted contemporary romance young adult novel, look no further. Bonus points if you love Disney movies and want to read about a new fictional resort - this is the book for you. Madison is a hopeless romantic and she is obsessed with everything Disney. When her girlfriend dumps her right before her Spring Break trip to the new Happily Ever Island, Madison is distraught. You see, the new resort needed to test out all of the new scenes on the island, so everyone in attendance had to write an essay about why they wanted to play a certain character while they spent a week on the island. Madison has been cast as the beautiful Cinderella and can't imagine giving up her spot to visit this new resort. Luckily for her, her best friend Lanie reluctantly agrees to step in at the last minute, taking the place of Merida. Lanie knows the bare minimum about Disney but is willing to dive right into the world of being a badass princess while navigating all the intricacies of being on an island devoted to making all the magic of Disney movies come alive.

If I'm being honest, I didn't have very high expectations for this book going in. I wasn't expecting it to blow me out of the water or anything and I think that helped me enjoy the book more than I thought I might. I loved seeing what life would be like for these average Disney fans as they worked to encompass everything about their assigned Disney character. I loved seeing all of the activities that took place for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Frozen. I also enjoyed both Madison and Lanie's characters. Seeing them learn and grow both together and apart from each other as they spend a magical Spring Break on Happily Ever Island was a lot of fun. This is a genuinely fun way to spend several days.

Now I wish there was a real Happily Ever Island to visit so I can live my dreams of having a giant library and dishes that clean themselves.

TW: panic attack, death

**Thank you to NetGalley and Disney Hyperion for the advanced readers copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.