Red, White & Royal Blue
Red, White & Royal Blue #1
Casey McQuiston
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Publication date: May 14, 2019
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Rating:
First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz is the closest thing to a prince this side of the Atlantic. With his intrepid sister and the Veep’s genius granddaughter, they’re the White House Trio, a beautiful millennial marketing strategy for his mother, President Ellen Claremont. International socialite duties do have downsides—namely, when photos of a confrontation with his longtime nemesis Prince Henry at a royal wedding leak to the tabloids and threaten American/British relations. The plan for damage control: staging a fake friendship between the First Son and the Prince.
As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?
My thoughts…
This was a cute romance between the first son of the US and the Prince of Wales. Nothing groundbreaking, but a nice palette cleanser.
A lot of this story deals with politics as Alex’s mom gears up for re-election. Things like navigating the press, creating stories to direct the narrative, and just the overall pressures of always being watched were present in this story. However, the author does a great job adding in things that are not just campaign rooms or briefs. We got moments of weekend fun, trips, and visits between Henry and Alex while they try to keep their relationship under-wraps.
This story is told in Alex’s POV. So we don’t get too much intel on how things are going for Henry during all of this. I will say, the third-person narrative was jarring for me. I kept forgetting who Alex was, and I really didn’t like the fact that his mom was listed as her given name. I do much better with stories when they are in first-person since I’m able to better connect with what’s going on through their eyes.
I did find that the story dragged at times, with all the email exchanges. Pages and pages of emails between the two as they quote books. I get that it was there to build a connection with the readers, but I was just bored out of my mind. It was a lot of telling and not a lot of showing. I wanted to see them interact. I wanted to see them navigate this new change in their life. I didn’t want to read an entire chapter dedicated to emails.
This story started out strong, but did have some hiccups for me both with the writing style and with the overall flow of the story.
