The President’s Son Fell for a Prince. I Fell Too.

A First Son, a Prince, and a Very Expensive Cake

Here’s the setup, in case you’ve been living under a rock or just don’t read the backs of books: Alex Claremont-Diaz is the son of the first female President of the United States, half Mexican, ambitious, a little insufferable in the way smart twenty-something political operatives are always a little insufferable. Henry is a literal prince of England, third in line to the throne, gorgeous, repressed, sad in that specific royal way where his sadness has its own PR strategy. The two of them hate each other, or think they do, and then at a royal wedding there’s an incident involving a cake that ends up in an international incident, which is somehow the least contrived thing about how these two get shoved into each other’s orbit.

What follows is a fake-friendship-to-smooth-things-over-for-the-cameras plot that anyone who’s read a romance novel before can see coming from a mile off: proximity, texting at 3am, an email chain that becomes the emotional spine of the whole book, a trip to Texas, a trip to London, a lot of secret-relationship tension because obviously the son of the American president and an English prince cannot just be dating out in the open. McQuiston stacks the stakes high. This isn’t just will-they-won’t-they, it’s will-they-won’t-they-and-also-possibly-destabilize-a-presidential-reelection-campaign-and-the-line-of-succession. It’s a lot. It’s supposed to be a lot.

The Emails Are the Whole Point (And Also Kind of the Problem)

Look, the thing everyone remembers about this book, correctly, is the emails. Alex and Henry’s correspondence is genuinely some of the best banter-into-intimacy writing I’ve read in the genre. It does the thing good epistolary romance always does: shows you two people falling in love through the specific, escalating way they choose words for each other. There’s a real pleasure in watching Henry’s stiff, formal Windsor reserve slowly get dismantled by Alex’s chaotic, hyper-verbal energy, and watching Alex, underneath all his swagger, turn out to be the one who’s actually scared.

Here’s the thing though. This book is baggy. It runs long, and about a third of the way through I remember thinking, does every single conversation need three additional supporting characters chiming in? The side cast (Nora, June, Pez, Bea) is charming, but McQuiston never met a scene that couldn’t use one more quip from the group chat, and the pacing sags in the middle stretch where it’s mostly Alex being anxious about feelings he hasn’t admitted to yet. I put it down for almost two weeks in the middle of that stretch, which is not something I do lightly with a book people had been telling me for years was going to wreck me.

Then it picked back up, hard, in the back third, and I want to be honest that a big chunk of what got me was Alex’s arc with his own biracial identity and his relationship to his mother’s politics, which is smarter and more specific than the marketing for this book ever gives it credit for. There’s a scene where Alex is talking about what it means to be Mexican-American in a White House that treats his existence as a talking point, and it lands with actual weight, not just vibes.

My real criticism, the one I’ll die on: the political plot, the stuff with the election and the tabloid leak and the third act crisis, is the weakest part of the book by a wide margin. It’s there because a romance needs an obstacle, and it works fine as an obstacle, but it’s never as interesting as the two people at the center of it. I also think, and I say this as someone who liked this book a lot, that some of the internet’s “this changed my life” reaction says more about how starved queer readers were for a joyful, glossy, big-swing romance like this in 2019 than it says about the book being flawless. Both things can be true. It can be genuinely good and also a product of exactly the right book landing at exactly the right moment.

The best romances make you believe two specific, flawed people are worth all the trouble they cause each other, and this one does that so well you forgive it the rest.

About Casey McQuiston

Casey McQuiston writes like they’re allergic to a quiet moment, which is a compliment. They came up through Southern Louisiana and fandom culture before this book turned them into one of the most recognizable names in queer romance overnight, and their follow-ups (One Last Stop, I Kissed Shara Wheeler) show the same instincts: big emotional swings, chaotic ensemble casts, a real tenderness under all the noise. McQuiston writes like someone who grew up starving for these stories and is now making up for lost time on the page, one overstuffed group chat at a time.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

• One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, for the same big heart with a time-travel subway romance instead of a political one
• The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun, for reality-TV chaos with the same slow-burn tenderness
• Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, for fake-relationship banter with a sharper comedic edge
• Him by Sarina Bowen and Elle Kennedy, for another beloved slow-burn between two guys who insist they hate each other

You can find the book here if you want to see what all the fuss is about firsthand.

For your book club

1. Does Alex’s arc about his own biracial identity feel earned to you, or does it get overshadowed by the romance plot?
2. The emails are the emotional core of this book. Did they work better for you than the scenes where Alex and Henry are actually together in person?
3. Is the political thriller subplot necessary, or is it just scaffolding to keep the lovers apart?
4. Do you think this book would land the same way if it were published today instead of in 2019?
5. Which side character deserved more page time, and which one could have been cut without anyone noticing?