Release Date: May 14, 2019
Genre: Contemporary Romance - enemies to lovers (royal and first son)
Hero POV - 3rd person
Heat: fade to black
Length: 432 pages
Format: eARC provided by NetGalley
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
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About the Book
A big-hearted romantic comedy in which First Son Alex falls in love with Prince Henry of Wales after an incident of international proportions forces them to pretend to be best friends...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. Alex is busy enough handling his mother’s bloodthirsty opponents and his own political ambitions without an uptight royal slowing him down. But beneath Henry’s Prince Charming veneer, there’s a soft-hearted eccentric with a dry sense of humor and more than one ghost haunting him.
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. And Henry throws everything into question for Alex, an impulsive, charming guy who thought he knew everything: What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?
My Review
★★★★★
I read this story slowly. I savored it. I never wanted it to end. Now how do I summarize my thoughts and feelings in such a way to truly capture everything I went through while reading this incredible book?... there's the Prince of England kissing him under a linden tree in the garden, moonlight in his hair...
First, I tell you that this is going down as one of my favorite reads of ALL TIME!! Then I'll tell you that if you love love and everything that it encapsulates, then you need to read this book. I'll then say that Alex and Henry will instantly steal your heart, one fight and then one insolent banter and then one romantic moment at a time. These two characters will own you with their fight for identity, their fight for rights and freedoms, their fight for love, and their fight for each other. And then I'll state that there are so many secondary characters to fall in love with that your heart will feel so full way before the story ends. I'm so sad it ended but I am so happy that I got there.
He wants to match the new freckles across Henry's nose to the stars above them and make him name the constellations.
Calling this story beautiful seems inadequate. For a debut piece of work, Casey McQuiston knocked it right out of the park on the first swing. I marveled at the words she put together. How was she able to capture such fine and almost evasive emotions with such simple sentences? I couldn't help but feel it all! There was so much warmth and caring and compassion and hope within these pages and it was full of so much feeling!
It hits him, fully: the weight of this. How completely neither of them will ever be able to undo it.
"Okay," he says. "I'm into making history."
Both Alex and Henry were dealing with so much pressure. Can you imagine being the First Son (FSOTUS), constantly in the public eye, working towards a political career of your own, viewed as the favored one, the life of the party and a living icon, realizing your bisexual, and then having to deal with the fallout for everyone to see? Or imagine being the crowned prince of England, the epitome of Prince Charming, expected to carry on the royal line, with all of the huge expectations that all of that comes with, being gay, and dealing with it for the whole world to see? Falling in love with each other made their story tragically beautiful. My heart was able to break and swell and burst with joy while witnessing it all.
And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you.
And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it?
Sometimes, even now, I still can't. ~ Henry
They were supposed to be enemies. It would probably have been so much easier if they had hated each other. But true love could not be denied and a future entwined was inevitable. The story of Alex + Henry was beyond epic - it was transcendental!
You love so much bigger than yourself, bigger than everything. I can't believe how lucky I am to even witness it - to be the one who gets to have it, and so much of it, is beyond luck and feels like fate. ~ Alex
About the Author
Casey McQuiston grew up in the swamps of Southern Louisiana, where she cultivated an abiding love for honey butter biscuits and stories with big, beating hearts. She studied journalism and worked in magazine publishing for years before returning to her first love: joyous, offbeat romantic comedies and escapist fiction. She now lives in the mountains of Fort Collins, Colorado, with a collection of caftans and her poodle mix, Pepper.
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