An Affair to Remember: Exploring Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston

Book Review by Reet Handay

Rating: ★★★★ ★(5/5)

Genres: Romance, LGBT, Contemporary, Fiction, Queer, Young Adult, New Adult, Audiobook, Contemporary Romance, Adult

In this month of my birthday merriment, I have resolved to indulge in the delightful pastime of revisiting my most beloved literary works.

"Thinking about history makes me wonder how I’ll fit into it one day, I guess. And you too. I kinda wish people still wrote like that. History, huh? Bet we could make some." 

 An Unbeatable Journey from Rivals to Lovers

Ah, yes, the one trope that sings to me the most: rivals to “if we never have to be in the same vicinity as each other, it'll be too soon” to “ugh we're forced to work together to save our countries' reputations but this doesn't change anything I still very much cannot stand you” to “wait, you're actually kind of a decent person and we get along really well, I might have judged you too harshly but don't read too much into it” to “oh god I think I might actually like you but THIS DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING” to “goddammit I will literally fistfight the moon for you and kill anyone who dares lay a finger on you I am so screwed” to lovers. An undefeated arc.

When Pretend Becomes Real: A Heartwarming Friendship

Alex Claremont-Diaz, the Mexican-American first son of the United States, tolerates Henry, the Prince of England, to about the same degree that Henry tolerates him, which is not at all. When one of their verbal sparring matches ends in a “cataclysmically, internationally, terrible way”, Alex and Henry have no choice but to play nice with each other. Of course, building a friendship with your sworn nemesis is never easy; doing it out of a grudging sense of obligation is virtually impossible. Only, neither Alex nor Henry are prepared for when it all ceases to be pretend. There is no pretending away the momentous thing tentatively taking shape between them. How with every traded truth, every phone call at an ungodly hour in the morning, every stolen fugitive moment in a hotel room, they've slowly, inexorably worn at the shells surrounding each other's hearts. And with every crack, it is harder to deny this thing blazing between them. Yet, all the same, reality threatens to shatter it all.

“Do you feel forever about him?” And there’s no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he is known all along. “Yeah,” he says, “I do.”

 A Love That Sneaks Up on You: Alex and Henry's Story

Is it possible for your whole body to grin? Because that's what reading this novel felt like. Red, White & Royal Blue is a beautiful story of romance that pulled a smile from a new place in me where so much joy had been waiting in reserve. I read it in one single, feverish setting, drawing out the last 50 pages or so, absolutely unable—unwilling—to let this book go. The novel’s warm heart leaped out to my cold one, and I held on like someone who suspected it all of being a dream that was about to end and leave them falling.

Yes, the rumors are true, folks: I am a hopeless romantic. What else to call it—this aching longing for someone to feel for me some glimmer of what Henry and Alex feel for each other? To find that one person who has so much tenderness for you, whom you can talk to and emerge each time a bit less uncertain, a bit more yourself, the one person who will help you lay out the indistinct chaos of your life, so there’d be less of a tangle in your heart? Just the sheer joy of simply knowing another.

When Alex was a kid, before anyone knew his name, he dreamed of love like it was a fairy tale, as if it would come sweeping into his life on the back of a dragon one day. When he got older, he learned about love as a strange thing that could fall apart no matter how badly you wanted it, a choice you make anyway. He never imagined it’d turn out he was right both times.

Characters Who Grow, Individuality Shines

There’s such a flood of love spooling out between Henry and Alex, tender and joyful and pure. I love how Alex glides into love unaware, too terrified to put a name to the immensity of his feelings, to make it definite and thus inescapable. Then, he plummeted, and it was unmistakable. And all the while, Henry was there, with a lit cinder of hope in his words, and the calm resignation to the inevitable of people aching with the yearning to be loved back.

Though the fiercely kindled core of the story is the burgeoning connection between Henry and Alex, each of the characters does a lot of growing, individually, throughout the novel. Red, White & Royal Blue is a story lit up like a beacon for those of us still struggling against the confines of family and legacy and creating a life all your own. It is a story of hope; hope that in a world wrecked by tragedy, where goodness seems so vanishingly rare, it is still worth it to care, to dream, to believe that with earnest work and effort, the sands of the world would, grain by grain, shine bright once again.

“Take anything you want and know you deserve to have it.”

Addressing Bisexuality and Breaking Stereotypes

I also really love how the author handles, with such care sensitivity, and compassion, the bisexual awakening of a character who only comes to realize, accept, and embrace his bisexuality in his twenties. Learning the facets of one's gender and sexuality is a journey with no definite beginning or end point. The myth of "coming out" too early or too late is just that: a myth. And I appreciate the author for adding their voice to the growing number of queer literature shattering the glass cannons of such received notions.

 Tackling Racism, Gender, Responsibility, and Ethics

Red, White & Royal Blue also succeeds with brilliance and verve in addressing issues about racism, gender, responsibility, and ethics. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the cheeky undercurrent flowing through the novel—the arched eyebrow, the bold and confiding voice. It was all so glorious. As glorious at the fact that this book, at its heart, is a joyful celebration of the people who work so hard to carve out a place for themselves in a world that gives them freely to everyone else—those who are told that their dreams do not match where they came from and would therefore never be realized, those who love and believe in spite of odium and condemnation.

A Celebration of Hope and Finding Your Place

This is genuinely one of the best romance novels that I’ve ever read. I know I keep saying love is fake, but reading this book melted my cold dead heart and I’m a believer again. And though I have always been incapable of choosing a "favorite book," I know now that if I had to be stuck on a desert island, with only one book to bring with me, it would most likely be this one. Casey McQuiston is a child of the internet, and it shows.

It shows in the way she speaks about cancel culture, Twitter reply guys, and the eternal binge-ability of Parks and Recreation in the span of one conversation. It also shows in the hyper-specificity of her debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, a romantic comedy with a distinctly 2019 sensibility, thanks to the near relentlessness of its pop-culture references. Case in point: a party scene set to Lil Jon’s “Get Low,” featuring “that guy from Stranger Things” and a nameless actress “from the new Spider-Man movies.” But this is what it means to be 28-year-old McQuiston, who worked in magazine publishing before writing her book. “My brand is writing super of-the-moment books,” she says. “I’m not writing to be timeless.”

That’s probably why Red, White & Royal Blue became the year’s surprise best seller and the so-called book of the summer. Set in a reality where the United States elected a female Democrat to the presidency in 2016, the novel follows the secret romance between first son Alex Claremont-Diaz and British royalty Prince Henry. It’s pure rom-com, down to its enemies-to-lovers premise and the bubblegum pink of its cover. Yet it’s also a highly specific story—a queer romance as interested in flirty Snapchats as it is in addressing its characters’ struggles with anxiety and depression. It’s honest in a way that resonates in an era where more and more millennials are openly discussing their mental health issues.

 A Fun, Specific, and Honest Rom-Com for the Modern Era

But more than anything, it’s just a lot of fun. After ruining a royal wedding by pushing each other into the wedding cake, Alex and Henry are forced to spend time together for the sake of maintaining positive U.S.–British relations. Theirs is a begrudging courtship by way of 20-something flirting, where one’s true feelings are a valuable currency to be spent judiciously. “Horrible Revolting Heir,” Alex writes in an email to Henry. “It’s recently come to my attention that you’re not quite as boring as I thought.”

McQuiston considers herself a student of the rom-com, and counts You’ve Got Mail among her favorites. But when it came time to write her own, she says she had to write what she wanted to read. “I felt like what I was missing was something packaged like all of the rom-com that I loved growing up. And that was this shiny, colorful, 10 Things I Hate About You–a type of experience, where it was frothy and trope-y, and it felt like a million things you’d read before but it felt new at the same time.”

She crafted Red, White & Royal Blue to reflect the world as she knew it. Alex’s bisexuality, for instance, was a subject she had never seen in such a pop commercial format, in a trade paperback that someone from her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, could feasibly pick up in a Barnes & Noble. But McQuiston, who is bisexual, is quick to disavow any claims that she’s breaking new ground, crediting authors such as N.K. Jemisin blazing the trail for her. “I’m not reinventing the wheel here,” she says. “I’m not the bi messiah, you know? I never want to Sam Smith myself.”

She may not be reinventing anything, but she’s done her part in bringing the genre into the Internet age. Stretches of Alex and Henry’s interactions are exclusively in email or text message, mirroring the way people her age communicate largely through social media and online. Even her dialogue is designed to sound like the world she knows. “I write with this particular group chat rhythm where everybody has their little role in the group chat, and it flows really fast and that’s how it is,” she explains. “It’s an instinctual rhythm that so many millennials internalize, which makes for really good book banter.”

As for Red, White & Royal Blue’s success, McQuiston thinks the book is a lightning strike of the right place, right time, and right story. Its frank representation—a biracial first family, an openly trans-Secret Service agent—and mix of romantic charm and political optimism offer a salve to today’s fraught climate. “What we’re seeing right now in rom-com is that it’s not a fairy tale anymore to only center on people who look the same as everyone in positions of power making the world burn,” she says. “That kind of stuff is just not escapist for me.”

Which is to say Red, White & Royal Blue has clarified what she—and her favorite genre—can do for a world seeking escapism. “I’m not a lawmaker, I’m not a politician. I’m not even an organizer. That’s not my gift in life. But what I can do is basically the equivalent of being the waterboy for those people. And the water is frothy, escapist, romantic comedy.”

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