My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
From the cover:
"When his mother became President of the United States, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius - his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There's only one problem: Alex has a beef with an actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex/Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family and state and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: Stage a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instagrammable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the presidential campaign and upend two nations. It raises the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through?"
Before we get started, I've got to qualify my rating a bit. I would rate about the first 150 pages of this at three, but the last half is a solid five, and so...here we are at four. My biggest wish for the start of the book is that the rivalry between Alex and Henry was better. Obviously it couldn't be anything gigantic, otherwise it would have been pretty unbelievable that the pair would develop feelings for each other, but it swung way too far the other direction and was less a "beef" between rivals and more a secret one-sided dislike because as teenagers Henry was a little rude to Alex once. Not the most compelling start to a story. It didn't hook me.
That said, if you can move past that weak rivalry tea and press on, I ended up shipping Alex and Henry hard (also June and Nora, but that's a blog post for another day, I suppose). Honestly, I would read 400+ pages JUST of Alex and Henry's emails. Most of my biggest laughs came either from those exchanges or their texts earlier on, and their email postscripts never failed to leave me teary-eyed. I also bawled for like the last 75 pages of the book, which...granted, I am known to cry at a book, but not usually that excessively.
I don't even know what to say about why this story got me so far into my feels, beyond that the relationships Casey McQuiston developed were beautiful. Whether its Henry and Alex fighting for each other or their loved ones positioned fiercely at their backs no matter what, I am here for all of it. It was also strangely uplifting to spend some time in this alternate reality in which the US didn't elect a fascist garbage human as President and instead went with the candidate who had the best interests not only of the country but also of her family at heart. In her acknowledgements, McQuiston admits that after the 2016 election she gave up on writing the book for months, and I'm so glad she ultimately decided to keep going. This book was a much-needed reminder for me that even when things feel hopeless, there are people who genuinely care and want what's best for their country and the people around them.
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