Review: The Royal We

Title:       The Royal We
Author:   Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan
Rating:   ★★★

Availability:  Book Depository | Kobo | Barnes & Noble | Amazon | iBooks
*ARC received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was very excited to read The Royal We. I love royal characters and reading about their day-to-day lives. I was thinking it's like The Princess Diaries, which I absolutely enjoyed.

"I might be Cinderella today, but I dread who they'll think I am tomorrow. I guess it depends on what I do next."

American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasized about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune. Yet it's Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Great Britain's future king. And when Bex can't resist falling for Nick, the person behind the prince, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit, under a spotlight she is not prepared to face.

Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick's sparkling and far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is much thornier and more tragic than anyone on the outside knows. The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he's fated to become.

Which is how she gets into trouble.

Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she's sacrificed for love-her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself-will have been for nothing.

However, The Royal We proved to be ordinary for me. Yes, it did deliver stories about royalty and it did state that it's inspired by the Duke and Duchess of Wales William and Kate, but there was nothing special about it. In fact, the story felt so similar to what I perceive to be the life of the duke and the duchess, that the line between reality and make-believe kept blurring in my mind.

Which resulted in me feeling dissatisfied by the story. Because I wanted to know more. I wanted the story to be more hyped, to be grander, but the story turned out to be the opposite. It as more about Nick wanting to be normal, and that didn't excite me very much.

The saving grace to the story were the secondary characters because they were great supporting characters. They were different and gave me new insight into how royalty could possibly interact with other people, and how protective their friends are. They were also the one who spiced up the story and added the much-needed humor. I didn't like Bex and Nick's respective siblings, though, because I felt that they were clichés.

I don't regret reading The Royal We because it was fluff and did entertain me for a couple of hours, but it just fell flat of my expectations and thus left me dissatisfied.

Are there any teen royalty books you can recommend? :)


Cheers,