Red, White and Royal Blue

Everything: 2,4/5

World: 3/5

Characters: 2/5

Plot: 2/5

Writing: 4/5

Review in a sentence: I was really disappointed about how poorly written and superficial everything was.

Book:

Author: Casey McQuinston

Goodreads Review: 4.24 (April 2021)

Pages: 459

Genre: Romance/Contemporary

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:

I was so disappointed by this book, I had really high hopes for it and thought the idea was brilliant and it was the implementation was just terrible in my opinion. Everybody told me that we get so cute and deep characters and an romance, but for me no character was really special. They always talked about the feelings they have, you just never really saw them. The different characters had a lot potential, a badass president mom, a depressive prince, and confused main character with his head full of dreams, a writer sister and a super smart bestfriend, but if they wouldn't mention all the time that they are depressiv/smart/confused/dreamy you wouldn't release it. The romance was exactly the same, the feelings were just written and not shown. The baddest part was that most of the really important steps in it were even left out. I could have kind of excused it if we at least got a plot, the only thing happened was that they feared a scandal, which of course we get and a very predictable election. So many opportunities were wasted, in which we could have seen discussions, about racism, homophobia and immigration, the author tried, but saying homophobia and racism is bad is I think for everyone with a little common sense. At least I liked the very fast paced writing, which had some funny details and the world, which had a lot of history and classic literature in it, but it wasn't enough to make up my issues with this book. I think this book only was this popular because of the representation, for me it was technically showed, but in an odd way that it was just a bonus point for the characters and you could probably erase all of it, except for the sexuality of the main characters and it would still make sense.