Red, White & Royal Blue
Title: Red, White & Royal Blue
Author: Casey McQuiston
Published: 13th August 2020
Genre: Young Adult, Fiction, Romance, LGBT Literature
Number of pages: 464(Hardcover)
448(Paperback)
Start Date: 12th January 2022
Finish Date: 15th January 2022
Summary
Alex Claremont-Diaz is handsome, charismatic, a genius, pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House ever since his mother first became President of the United States. There’s only one problem. When the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an altercation between Alex and Prince Henry, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family and state devise a plan for damage control: stage a truce. But what begins as a fake, Instagrammable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon they are hurtling into a secret romance that could derail the presidential campaign and upend two nations.
Review
In this book you meet the first son of the United States Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry of Wales. At first it seems like a typical oversea rivalry, but then things change when they are forced to work together to make things seem right. Before long things are right but could they easily go wrong again. Alex, the Mexican-American first son of the United States endures Henry, the Prince of England to the same degree that Henry endures him, but the claws are never entirely sheathed. Doing it out of a reluctant sense of obligation is virtually impossible.
Only, neither Alex nor Henry are prepared for when it all ceases being pretend. There is no pretending away the momentous thing tentatively taking shape between them. Henry has worn at the shell surrounding Alex’s heart with every traded truth, every phone call at an ungodly hour and every stolen moment in a hotel room. And with every crack, it is harder to deny the connection blazing between them.
I love Henry so much. His entire life, he had sailed upon the quiet ripple of his parents’ lives, struggling against the confines of family and legacy and creating a life all his own. But there was so much gold in him, the shine dimmed by years of telling himself there was something wrong with the way he was made.
The enormity of this burden was so great it almost wore Henry out, and it smote my heart. But seeing him later embrace the certainty that he’s deserving of compassion and kindness and understanding, it genuinely made me at once gutted and filled with unspeakable tenderness for him. I’m so glad Alex was there to help him see the aspects of his being that were in darkness even to him and give him hope before he had even considered hope to be possible.
Red, White & Royal Blue is an astonishingly polished debut novel. A beguiling story of romance that pulled a smile from a new place in me where so much delight had been waiting in reserve. I read the last 200 pages in two hours, the thought of leaving the story and not knowing where it went was just horrible to imagine. The book left me wanting to see more of Alex and Henry’s love story. Will they be together forever?
I honestly love the way Casey wrote this book, it didn’t seem cliche to me at all; it felt like I was reading someone’s love story, someone that I knew. The genre of this book is LGBT literature and romance novels. This is the first LGBT book I have read and honestly the way it was written was beautiful especially as it explored the stigma that Henry faces as the Prince of England.
If you are a fool for love, romance and passion; this is the book for you! This book I would say is for 16 or over because of the way it is written but it is meant to be read.
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️