I often like to think of books like tv shows. I read books like I watch a show, and there are a lot of parallels between the narrative structure. You have your ‘monster of the week’ chapters that go over something benign, say, throwing a party while mom’s away. You have your dark hidden past that you as the readwatcher get fed drip, say, how you drugged your best friend and she went into a coma as a result, and she’s woken up and you have to hope she never remembers what happened. And then you have your season arc plot. The wedding of century but American.
I say this, because it also lets me talk about my other favorite phenomenon in TV, the “Season 2 Budget Upgrade”. When that 8 episode, 1 season low budget show becomes a massive uber hit, and suddenly season 2 just is more polished. Lightning is better. Props are better. The sound is better. Think, season 1 of the Office versus season 2. Or Abbot Elementary.
And boy, did Majesty have a Season 2 Budget Upgrade. Having just finished book 1, which was good though sometimes it felt simply written, the writing instantly felt more… flowerly, for a lack of better terms. It felt like someone went over sentences with a thesaurus and replaced some of the repetition with slightly more chic words. Happy to Bubbly. On top of that it felt like the draft got an editor to do a proper critique of the style. There was way more showing instead of strictly telling. Events that one character does in the background, the reactions now happen in the foreground more readily. The pacing and flow of the book was significantly better.
Plot wise, all I could think of was, Princess Diaries 2 meets Gilmore Girls. Queen Mia is dating trying to decide between Jess/Logan hydrid or Dean before realizing that she’s a strong independent woman who don’t need no man to rule. Honestly, the wedding/ruling/chamberlain arc was almost comically construed. The point at which I just became utterly confused was when the queen goes to give her State of the Union/King’s Speech, and then discovers that the chamberlain, *without telling her* has taken that on himself. That’s tantamount to a coup. The chamberlain is comical levels of a misogynist. Does he give Bee a driver to become ‘a queen’ and stand up for herself? Sure. But doesn’t make it not comical.
The relationships in this book have a real speed dating feel to them. Last book, there was one pairing for everyone, this season they have changed, but don’t worry, going into next book, (almost) everyone is reset to their original status! Once I kinda figured out what the end of the book would be, I was mostly reading to see if the characters would do another scrubs S1 finale, dump all the secrets and blow up relationships for the cliff hanger (spoiler, they did, of course they did).
Overall, plot was fine but bolstered by much better writing this book.
Random thoughts I had during this book.
- At one point Ethan makes a reference to Lion king (Everything the light touches yada yada) but given the rest of the world, it’s so disassociating to see such a direct real timeline reference thrown in there. One of the cool things about this alt world is that it is able to the same common place items as the real world, but then just insert things for proper names. The statue of liberty is in DC not NYC. The museums are named after kings, not after James Smithsonian. But what that also means is that fundamentally, your cultural references won’t match. It’s like idioms.
- I really hope at some point there is some use of ‘Queen Bee’. Like, she’s not leaving the nest, she’s leaving the hive.
- Maybe the previous book too, but this book definitely, they talked about slavery taking 2 kings to ban. Now, I’m extrapolating here, but Washington dies in 1800. That’s one king. IRL he dies with no biological children, but he has a step grandson. Who dies in 1857. So that’s about when this hypothetical country is abolishing slavery. But… Unlike IRL, in this world, the king just *does* it. So there shouldn’t be a civil war (and if there was as a result of it, huge miss not talking about it). But that also means, tat there shouldn’t be any kind of large scale jim crow laws. Which is all to say, America in the book being as racist as it is, is really weird given the history of their country.
Stats: 4.35 hours to read over 6 days total