I found The Royal We excessively charming, for all that it is — as others have mentioned — Will and Kate Cambridge fanfiction. Every major player in their IRL romance has a direct analog here as far as I can tell (though I don’t truly consider myself an expert) and though our protagonist, Bex, is American, she still comes from money as Kate Middleton did. All of the major events in their romance are covered here, and, cover illustrations aside, even the physical descriptions of […]
A royal romance
Ok, I admit I did not have super high expectations for this one. I love the Fug Girls — their blog, which I’ve been reading for a freaking decade, cracks me up — but I found Spoiled and Messy (their two other YA novels) to be fun, but vapid (and in the case of Messy, occasionally annoying). The Royal We seems aimed at a more adult audience, and while it has its faults, I also think it’s probably the best book these two ladies have produced so far. “Well. You never have to […]
Summer Popcorn Reading
I know I’ve read Spoiled but I really didn’t remember it when I started on its sequel. Luckily Messy has a lot of recapping so it’s easy to pick up without having read the first novel, or picking it up with very little memory of the first one. Max is a high school student who is trying to save money for a writer’s program at NYU. Her best friend, Molly, is the long lost daughter of movie star Brick Berlin whose other daughter, Brooke, is […]
Perfect Beach Read
Only my great love for the Fug Girls would lead me to pick up a book with this kind of plot, but it’s a love greatly deserved and justified. This book is silly fluff, but it’s fun and I just loved the characters. And who am I to judge, really — I owned all the Clueless book when I was in middle school. So the first book in the series — Spoiled — is all about Molly, who finds out as her mother is dying that her real […]
“Rebecca, not everything from a Monty Python movie is real…There is no Camelot nor a Holy Grail. Although the bit with the killer rabbit is true.”
I am a big fan of the Fug Girls. While not a very fashion-forward person myself, their commentary keeps bringing me back to their site, day after day. I love their TV recaps (of course, they honed their skills at the dearly departed TWOP), and find myself watching shows I normally wouldn’t — hello, Nashville and Hart of Dixie — just so I can follow along with them. I read, and thoroughly enjoyed their two YA novels, Spoiled and Messy, and was totally excited to […]
The Perfect Summertime Read
The Royal We is basically well-written alternate universe William Wales and Kate Middleton fanfiction. (That’s not an insult by the way. I’m very much pro-fanfiction and side-eye people who make fun of it. Some of the most famous white dude classic fiction is totally fanfiction.) I’m sure the real Will and Kate story would be a snooze compared to the Nick and Bex story. American Rebecca Porter meets Nick and his quirky cast of friends while studying abroad at Oxford. Slowly they become friends and […]