The Royal We - Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan

This book has been on my to-read list for a while, so I was pretty excited when the Unapologetic Romance Readers group listed it as their second buddy read for May.  I snatched it up from the library and dove right in!  Unfortunately, The Royal We did not hit all the sweet spots I was hoping for.  In fact, this book was only okay.

The book starts with Rebecca "Bex" Porter fretting over her wedding to the grandson of the Queen of England, Nicholas; her phone is blowing up with ominous texts, we don't know from who, and it's clear that both she and her twin sister Lacey have done something bad, but it's not said what.  From that point, most of the book is a flashback that traces its way through Bex and Nick's relationship with all of its ups and downs, ons and offs.  Bex and Nick met when she went from Cornell to spend a semester abroad at Oxford, where he was attending, and by circumstance found herself subsumed into his friend group.  Originally she finds herself hooking up with his friend Clive, and just friendly with Nick, but obviously that changes.  While I found Bex and Nick's friendship adorable, once they moved into "more than friends" territory, I pretty much started hating everyone in this book.

Here's the thing: everyone in this book is terrible to each other.  Everyone.  Well, maybe not Bex's mom.  She's pretty nice.  But everyone else is nasty to everyone else and treats everyone else like shit on at least one occasion, and that's pretty hard to overcome.  Bex is also a ticking time bomb of a person and someone completely unsuitable to be a princess; I definitely agree with Nick's family and the press on that one.  She seems to spend all of her time drinking and sleeping around, while I objectively know that this is fine, because it's her life and whatever, I didn't approve of it, and didn't like her because of it.  Her self-destructive behavior also impacted the lives of everyone around her in a negative way, and I really thought that, while there were reasons for Bex to be upset, she also needed to grow up and face things like an adult instead of acting like a child.  I originally liked Nick, but he treated Bex pertty terribly on a couple of occasions when she didn't deserve it (there were other occasions on which she did) and that immediately put him on my bad list, too.  In fact, every character who originally seemed to be a good person eventually turned out to be nasty.  In that sense, this basically turned out to be a book about petty people doing petty things and generally being unlikable.

It's a pity, too, because this book had such potential.  It could easily have been about how nice people can be totally torn down by the press for things that they really shouldn't be faulted for, and how the press and politics and such can intrude on people's private lives to the point of actually destroying them.  In the beginning, it seemed like it was going that way...but raging sex in bathrooms (while hot; Cocks and Morgan can write some great kisses and steamy scenes that also manage to not be explicit) and year-long benders are hard to see as either romantic or sympathetic in my mind.  And when the book comes back to the original starting point and it becomes clear what's going on, it stops at a point before it becomes completely clear what the consequences of Bex and Lacey's bad behavior really will be.  Granted, it might have been hard to keep going and still find a good cut-off point, but I feel like that's a chance you have to be willing to take when you bring something like that up.

I'm not completely lost on this world (which does diverge from our own; the royal line is different going back pretty far, though all current events seem to be basically the same as far as I can tell) and I would actually really like to see a book about Freddie getting a love interest of his own and dropping the "Ginger Gigolo" personality, because I think Freddie might have a good core that could be explored, but I'd like to see less of the other characters in this book and a love interest who's a little more...wholesome.

2.5 stars out of 5; this just wasn't a hit for me.