Red White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
Synopsis:
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?
Bri’s Review
Note: this review contains spoilers.
Starting with what I really enjoyed about this book, Alex was such a fun main character to me. He seemed realistic as a kid who was originally pretty normal. His parents worked in politics, but he was just living his life. But then when it was around time for him to attend college, his mom became President of the United States, and he was thrust into a world as one of the First Children. He was likable to me, with the perfect balance of humor with the ability to be serious and a truly good friend to those around him. I loved reading about his relationship with his siblings and wanted to know more about them and their own personal love lives. I also thought that Henry was a great character. He wasn’t as free as Alex, he’d been raised completely in the sense of responsibility. He wasn’t thrown into anything, he knew from birth that he was a Royal and had to behave a certain way. But even he had his own ways of breaking the mold, being fun, and learning to love Alex’s antics. They made a cute couple.
My personal favorite character was Bea, and I might even pick up another book set in this universe if she gets to be the main character of the story. I didn’t mind the sex scenes being included, but they also didn’t add much to the relationship. They could’ve been excluded and I don’t think it would’ve affected my reading experience. My favorite part of seeing Alex and Henry grow was seeing them call one another and fall asleep on the phone together, or seeing their emails to one another (which in my Gen Z mind would have more likely been long-winded Discord messages in a private server).
The main problem I had with this book was its rather unfortunate timing. The only way this could have been avoided would have been to avoid tying this world down to a specific year, which I wish the author had done.
It felt unrealistic to read a book set in March of 2020 with young adults attending events like absolutely nothing was going on. It felt unrealistic to have two characters my age, EMAILING back and forth as a main form of communication. It felt unrealistic to have a world that refers to certain politicians by name but ignores the existence of others. It felt unrealistic to have a world where the Prince could be outed as gay with a biracial boyfriend with very little pushback when a large group today can’t even accept a biracial Princess in a heterosexual relationship. I felt like the racial aspect wasn’t even discussed that much in this book, and I wish it had been touched on a bit more. And I’m sure others can discuss if this is a book they couldn’t get into from a UK political perspective, I’m just not currently knowledgeable enough to say one way or another.
And I understand completely that some people need this unrealisticness. They needed this fantasy where Trump and Covid and everything else that we’ve been through in the past few years doesn’t exist. But for me, it took me out of the story so much. I feel like if the world had been made completely alternate, I could’ve been able to sink into the story more. If all the politicians’ names were made up and the book was set in the year 20XX so I wouldn’t be subconsciously comparing it to the present day, I would have been able to enjoy it so much more. But for now, this book already felt dated when it was released, and I’m sure that in 10 years it will feel even more so. This is a problem that I feel could have been so easily avoided but ended up turning the book from a 4 or 5-star read into a 3-star one.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is completely fine with the issues I mentioned above! There is still a fun story here to be enjoyed, it was just a bit tainted for me. If not, I wouldn’t suggest it.
Final Rating: 2.5 out of 5 books
