Dreams Come True at the Fairytale Museum - Jaimie Admans - ★★★.½
AUTHOR: Jaimie Admans
SERIES: Ever After Street, #6
GENRE: Romance-Drama
PUBLICATION DATE: October 13, 2025
RATING: 3.5 stars.
In a Nutshell: A romance combining the usual tropes with some strong emotional themes. Nice loveable characters, though they read younger than their age. Good story, great fairytale content. The sixth and final book of the Ever After series. Not the best book of the series, but definitely not the worst as well. A good one to bid adieu to Ever After Street with. Can be read as a standalone, but would recommend going in series order.
Plot Preview:
As the sole proprietor of the ‘Colours of the Wind’ museum, Lissa has run her business her way since the last decade on Ever After Street. So what if the museum is struggling?
When a know-it-all developer named Warren Berrington buys the building that houses the museum and plans to demolish the structure for a more profit-making cinematic mall, Lissa is horrified, but she knows she won't back down without a fight. They agree on a three-month truce, whereby Lissa will try to turn around the museum’s no-profit situation under Warren’s guidance. Turns out, Warren is really good at business redevelopment, even if Lissa doesn’t want to admit it. Can the two work together and save the museum on Ever After Street? Does Warren really want to save it?
The story comes to us in Lissa’s first-person perspective.
I don’t often read romcoms these days. But I have keenly waited for the books of the Ever After Street series ever since I read the first one. Each book is set on the magical-sounding street where every business enterprise is fairytale-themed. Further, every book pays an ode to a Disney classic. As this is the final book of the series, it seems to be offering homage to the entire Disney pantheon, creating a nice nostalgic experience for Disney fans. I am glad it didn’t stick only to ‘Colours of the Wind’ because it is one of the few movies I have watched just once and have zero recollection of.
Bookish Yays:
🌈 Lissa as a person. A woman who fights for others’ rights but ignores her own needs. Basically, a gem of a heart.
🌈 Warren. He has that rare quality I respect most in humans: common sense. He might come off as a tone-deaf grump at times (which he is, to be honest), but I actually admired his balance of practicality and creativity. He was the most level-headed of the characters.
🌈 Special credit to this series (and the author) for always showing MMCs with emotional vulnerability and even ready to show this side of them. Macho guys are so flat and boring!
🌈 Warren’s secret. Fairly guessable after a point, but this isn't a thriller anyway. It is used really well in the story.
🌈 The cameos by all the previous characters of the Ever After Street series. It felt so good to see them in this series finale. I appreciate that they weren’t just mentioned in passing but had at least a tiny active role to play over the course of the story.
🌈 While the start seems to have a hint of both enemy-to-lover and grumpy-to-sunshine, both of these tropes are at a much watered-down level and the transition is also almost instantaneous. Then again, it ended up as a complex enemies-to-friends-to-enemies-to-lovers arc, which works better for me.
🌈 Clean romance. No steam except stolen kisses and warm hugs and lovey-dovey looks. My kind of romance. (This series finally managed to convince me to relish touchy-feely scenes when well-written. All credit to the author for this miracle! No one writes ‘touchy-feely’ as amazingly as Jaimie Admans.)
🌈 The various references to Disney movies. Fairy tales fans will enjoy all the Easter eggs.
🌈 The Colours of the Wind museum, its displays and its promotional ideas. Quaint and cute.
🌈 Special shoutout to the adorable wishing well arc. Reminded me a little of another Jaimie Admans book: 'The Post Box at the North Pole', which was equally sweet.
Bookish Okays:
🎨 The story focusses mainly on Ever After Street characters and doesn’t introduce too many new ones. While this does help a lot in keeping the cast streamlined, one set of characters sorely missed is Lissa’s sisters. After being mentioned so many times over the story, it feels a bit odd that we don’t meet any of them even until the end. (Perhaps there could be a spinoff series with the sisters and their individual romances? Hint, hint!)
🎨 While the plot delivers on the feel-good factor, it is stretched quite thin. The overall pacing and plot development is also quite slow. I felt like I was reading more for the feels than for the story. Of course, the feels are on point, so there’s that. Plus, it is always better to be understated than over the top.
Bookish Nays: (Two Nays for the book, three Nays for the series as a whole)
💨 BOOK ISSUE: The social-media controversy just didn’t make logical sense. Who on earth would be offended that a business used cutesy marketing to attract new customers? I don’t want to go into spoilers, so I will offer a similar yet different example: would you get angry if you learnt that the Disney characters at Disneyland are actually humans dressed up as Disney characters? Would it count as cheating or misleading? Silly, right?
💨 BOOK ISSUE: The sheer lack of business awareness. Not a single idea connected to the rejuvenation of the museum even considers the practical constraints of copyright and licensing. Disney is known to be fiercely protective of its characters and designs being used for commercial purposes. Creative license is all fine and dandy, but this just went too far. Moreover, there’s a strong suggestion that businesses need to run on sentiment and not for profit. No matter how much I love fairy tales, I will never agree to that. Yes, they don’t need to focus merely on profit, but they cannot ignore profit as well. Profit is what ensures further investment, and hence contributes to the longevity of the enterprise. (Look at me dissing a romcom for ignoring legal and financial ramifications. Could you figure out that I am a Capricorn? 🤭)
💨 SERIES ISSUE: The book covers. Yes, the covers are all dreamy, but not a single one of them represents the characters accurately, which is really sad in a series where every lead pair has at least one unique feature between them. This time, Lissa has rainbow-coloured hair! Why isn't that on the cover? Why always use cookie-cutter representation on the cover?
💨 SERIES ISSUE: Neither lead character acts their age. I admire the series for always using slightly older lead characters, with every book having 35+ aged leads, some even being 40+ like Warren in this book. But there’s no point to having older characters if they sound like they are in their twenties.
💨 SERIES ISSUE: Romances obviously always have a formula, and no one really reads romances expecting innovative plotlines. However, when all the books of a series have a pattern, it feels repetitive. The tropes of toxic parent, dead parent, low self-esteem, poor business skills, and an almost-instant turnaround of the business have been used in every single book of this series. (To be fair, Book Five tried to break the pattern somewhat by adding an epistolary angle but failed miserably.) The most irksome of these to me is that the business owners in most of these six books ignore the financial/executional side of their business until their romantic other pointed out the issues. Lissa is especially ignorant as a business owner. I’ve no idea how her museum lasted ten years!
Overall, my nays look visibly hefty, but many are more indicative of the series as a whole than this book alone. Plus many readers might not even bother about boring practical stuff while reading romances. So at least a part of my negatives are more a ME problem than a BOOK problem. The story is quite sweet, even if it isn't punchy.
In many ways, this is a fitting finale to the Ever After Street series. We get to meet all the characters, we see Ever After Street doing well, we see happy endings not just for the six romance leads but also some other side characters. A series needs to stop at the right point, and this book is just that. I especially like that this book begins with the reveal that Sadie and Whit (from Book One) are getting married. A nice way to loop the circle. I will miss this beautiful street, no denying that.
This has been a delightful series on the whole, even if the first four books worked much better for me than the latter two. I’d still advocate this series to dreamy-romance lovers, even if the later books create déjà vu.
I look forward to whatever Jaimie Admans is working on, because whether I like her books or not, I do love the MMCs she creates. And what’s a romance without a delicious MMC, right? 😉
Recommended to fans of the series and to fairytale/romance readers. Don’t overthink if you want to enjoy it better. (In other words, don’t be like me. 🤭)
3.5 stars, rounding up wherever applicable because I did end the book with a smile than a grimace.
My thanks to Boldwood Books for a complimentary copy of ‘Dreams Come True at the Fairytale Museum’ via NetGalley. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.
The digital version of this book is available free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers.
Here are the earlier books of the charming ‘Ever After’ Series:
2. An Enchanted Moment on Ever After Street (My favourite!)
Comments
Post a Comment