Buckingham & Bex: The Royal We by Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan

I love a royal-esque romance as much as the next girl. The Prince and Me. The First Daughter. Chasing Liberty. Red White & Royal Blue. Hell, even Prince Harry and Megan Markle’s real-life romance. There’s just something “Cinderella” about an ordinary person falling in love with a prince or presidential spawn. It’s the fairytale of it all.

And yet, from the start, Bex and Nick share anything but a classic romance. Boy meets girl, girl mentions a trend of syphilis and incest in boy’s family, boy ignores girl even when she’s invited into his friend group, girl hooks up repeatedly with boy’s best friend, boy starts watching a cringe-worthy sci-fi tv show with girl to get his mind off being royal and realize they’re in love. You see what I mean?

What’s also nontraditional about this book is our view of how their relationship falls apart. Royal status and money aren’t a relationship made, especially when one paparazzi pic means house arrest until the buzz is gone. Though their love is sweet and relatably modern, I don’t see their relationship working out off the page. They just don’t have the stamina for it. Twins that sell stories to newspapers? Brothers falling in love with the lead? Oceans of distance? A family committed to keeping you apart reinforced by the British government? That’s not exactly promising. This was the first royal romance book where I was rooting for the leads to just leave each other alone. Sure, they love each other, but their first breakup shows readers that when it comes to monotony, their feelings just can’t withstand it. There always has to be drama. Something to fight for. Someone to stand against. That just isn’t real life. What happens when Nicholas becomes king? The way Bex’s life fell apart when they broke up, the way it depended on him entirely before they were even publically official, is just toxic.

This book sits as a standalone novel and introduction to a series. Will I be continuing on with Bex and Nicholas? Maybe. But I can’t see a future without at least a few more breakups. I hate to think everyone would have been better off if Bex just called their relationship what it was —a semester fling—and went home to NYU with some cool British friends to visit in the summers and a cool story to tell her grandkids.

3 stars