5 stars
I want you to imagine two things: One, think of Kate and Wills not as clotheshorses, curiousities or stuffy royals, but as flawed twenty-somethings who have to sort their shit out with the whole world watching. Secondly, imagine that Kate wrote a tell-all book about that experience. Because that's pretty much what The Royal We is: a thinly-veiled, no-holds-barred, somewhat sensationalist imagining of the royal courtship. Except instead of Wills and Kate, we have Nick and Bex, an American on exchange to Oxford. It sounds terrible, but it wasn't. And, from a card-carrying member of the Australian Republican Movement who thinks we should ditch the royals, that's quite a testimony.
The thing that made The Royal We work was its humour. Bex's narration is searingly honest and often very ambivalent, and yet she always remains hilariously droll. Not only do she and the other characters have a sense of humour, they also have funny little quirks, like Prince Nicholas, who loves crap TV so much he votes for people on reality shows.
And yet, I wouldn't want to give the impression this book was a laugh a minute, because it wasn't. Somehow, I ended up crying. Twice. I blame this on the fact that Cocks and Morgan make the reader empathise with just about every single character in the book, who are all superbly drawn, vulnerable and human. When I started audibly sobbing, I told myself to take a break, and yet I kept reading. There was something compelling about The Royal We, a need to know what happened next, and the ending is far from a foregone conclusion. There was, of course, a HEA, but it was a real-life HEA, an acknowledgement of imperfection and mistakes and a decision to stick together forever in spite of them.
The HEA is all the more poignant for the ups and downs Nick and Bex and their circle of friends and family go through. As I said, this is no whirlwind fairytale, but a long book set over several years. It took a while to read, and if your response to it is anything like mine, it will need commitment, because it's not the kind of book you put down willingly.
There was the stray Americanism at which I ground my teeth, and sometimes it also required a greater-than-usual suspension of disbelief, but, ultimately, the level of absorbstion it induced in me makes it impossible to give The Royal We anything but 5 stars.
I want you to imagine two things: One, think of Kate and Wills not as clotheshorses, curiousities or stuffy royals, but as flawed twenty-somethings who have to sort their shit out with the whole world watching. Secondly, imagine that Kate wrote a tell-all book about that experience. Because that's pretty much what The Royal We is: a thinly-veiled, no-holds-barred, somewhat sensationalist imagining of the royal courtship. Except instead of Wills and Kate, we have Nick and Bex, an American on exchange to Oxford. It sounds terrible, but it wasn't. And, from a card-carrying member of the Australian Republican Movement who thinks we should ditch the royals, that's quite a testimony.
The thing that made The Royal We work was its humour. Bex's narration is searingly honest and often very ambivalent, and yet she always remains hilariously droll. Not only do she and the other characters have a sense of humour, they also have funny little quirks, like Prince Nicholas, who loves crap TV so much he votes for people on reality shows.
And yet, I wouldn't want to give the impression this book was a laugh a minute, because it wasn't. Somehow, I ended up crying. Twice. I blame this on the fact that Cocks and Morgan make the reader empathise with just about every single character in the book, who are all superbly drawn, vulnerable and human. When I started audibly sobbing, I told myself to take a break, and yet I kept reading. There was something compelling about The Royal We, a need to know what happened next, and the ending is far from a foregone conclusion. There was, of course, a HEA, but it was a real-life HEA, an acknowledgement of imperfection and mistakes and a decision to stick together forever in spite of them.
The HEA is all the more poignant for the ups and downs Nick and Bex and their circle of friends and family go through. As I said, this is no whirlwind fairytale, but a long book set over several years. It took a while to read, and if your response to it is anything like mine, it will need commitment, because it's not the kind of book you put down willingly.
There was the stray Americanism at which I ground my teeth, and sometimes it also required a greater-than-usual suspension of disbelief, but, ultimately, the level of absorbstion it induced in me makes it impossible to give The Royal We anything but 5 stars.
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