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Review: The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan



Blurb from Goodreads:
"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.
My Review:
 
Unfortunately, this book was so, so disappointing to me.  One, I read The Fug Girls every day -- although it can be a bit mean, I laugh a lot while reading it.  Two, I have read Heather's and Jessica's other two books -- Spoiled and Messy, and I LOVED them both!  Those books were YA, unlike The Royal We, and they were witty and hilarious -- everything I expect when I read The Fug Girls.  Three, this book was a serious downer -- I felt so melancholy when I finished that I had to go re-read one of my favorite comfort books to lift me from the sad funk I was in when I finished.  Needless to say, I had high (although I thought deserved) expectations for this book and those expectations fell flat.

I thought this book was going to be a funny yet romantic spin on the Wills and Kate story -- a lot of similarities but that there would be the humorous differences that I knew Jessica and Heather would bring.  However, this is not a love story!  BIG TIME SPOILER ALERT: In the end, Nick doesn't even want to marry Bex because she's kissed his brother -- twice -- but he goes through with it because it would be too much work to call it off.  Um, no thanks! /end spoiler

I liked the secondary characters of Gaz and Cilla -- they were original and unique but Bex's own twin sister, Lacey, was absolutely incorrigible.  She is awful!  Not only is she completely selfish but large portions of the book revolved around her and her carelessness.  UGH.  

I think, ultimately, this book just didn't work for me because it was more about all the times Bex and Nick were not together, and consequently out doing stupid things, than any sort of relationship that they had.  I loved the beginning of the book and when they first got together but things quickly went downhill after that, culminating in a seriously depressing ending after a slew of stupidity.  I can't say that I recommend this book although the writing is excellent as ever even if the story leaves MUCH to be desired.

The Royal We comes out tomorrow, April 7, 2015, and you can purchase HERE!  
Unlike Buckingham Palace, Sandringham is not just a residence; it's also an immense working estate, encompassing everything from national parkland to a sawmill and an apple juice factory.  But its jewel is the redbrick Sandringham House, paradoxically both sprawling and compressed to the eye, all narrow bay windows and vertical lines-- like someone carved out a longer cluster of row houses from one of London's ritzier boroughs, popped on pointier roofs, and plopped them int he middle of twenty thousand acres.  Approaching it in the eerie predawn dark felt wildly like being the heroine in a Jane Austen novel, headed to Netherfield Park to check on my pneumonia-riddle sister, or dropping by Pemberley for haughty verbal foreplay with Mr. Darcy. 

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