In their first adult
novel, authors Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan take on a story of
romance and rivalries inspired by today's most talked-about royal
couple: Will and Kate. American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy-tales. Her twin sister Lacey was always the romantic, the one who daydreamed of being a princess. But it's adventure-seeking Bex who goes to Oxford and meets dreamy Nick across the hall - and thus Bex who accidentally finds herself in love with the eventual heir to the British throne. Nick is everything she could have imagined, but Prince Nicholas has unimaginable baggage: grasping friends, a thorny family, hysterical tabloids tracking his every move, and a public that expected its future king to marry a native. On the eve of the most talked-about wedding of the century, Bex reflects on what she's sacrificed for love -- and exactly whose heart she may yet have to break.
Comment: The fun part of browsing blogs and bookish sites is that it can give us so many new ideas for more books to be read. Often, a single detail can be enough to make me interested in reading a book (sometimes it has a good outcome, others not so much), especially if I can add it to the TBR and it can become a possibility.
What sometimes happens is that so long goes since getting the book until the actual reading that I easily forget what was the detail that seemed so urgent for me to get the book in the first place.
It wasn't the case with this one, I'm all for adaptations of fairy tales within certain parameters and in this book's case, the idea of a novel based on William and Kate, the future King and Queen of England, apparently, felt too much like catnip!
In this book we follow the lives of Rebecca "Bex" Porter and Nick Wales, the fictional characters who resemblance Kate and William and how they met, they fell in love and they got themselves in the position of not being able to imagine life with someone else while at the same time being crowded by the paparazzi and the expected influence of everyone around them. Can this fictional story have such a happy ending as it happened in real life?
I was quite surprised by the length of this novel, I confess I didn't expect such a long book even when the time frame explored here compressed several years. This wouldn't be an issue if all the pages were amazing but I confess some were a little bit boring and the story dragged in some moments.
I know this is pure fiction but the starting point is still quite obvious to us and it's impossible not to make a comparison to reality so, besides the page count and the fiction, I also couldn't not notice how different things are to real life and how that affected the way I was reading and interpreting each new situation.
Bex and Nick's story begins in Oxford where Bex is going to study thanks to an interchange program. They met, they don't fall in love at first sight but they slowly develop a special friendship. With time their feelings change until they finally admit to one another how they really feel. From then, time goes by, their situation becomes more complicated because of his family and how public they relationship eventually gets. So, basically this is the outline of what we know about the real developments between Kate and William's relationship. What this book changes is the names and specific details and what could be the inside/personal situations Nick and Bex went though.
Like I said, the plot drags a bit in some moments... I think the authors tried to be very correct when it comes to the original timeline but while in real life what was happening wasn't something we could think about every day, here we need to read and some situations take a long time or are presented in a way I admit I wasn't fan of.
It was also difficult to imagine certain situations and think of them as possible within the type of scenario included. The differences the authors created to turn this into an original story (for instance, Bex has a twin sister, they are Americans, etc) were interesting but often led to things I, confessing, disliked. I'll say what as a spoiler, so don't check this unless you don't mean to read the book:
The twin's father dies at some point and that propels Bex and Nick's re involvement after a breakup and Bex and Freddie (Nick's younger brother) kiss twice and there's an inside blackmailer who threatens Bex and Nick's wedding.
All the mentioned annoyed me to be honest. I know it's just fiction and that some sort of conflict had to exist besides the difference in the protagonist' background for the plot to not only move along but also be more captivating. I do think this added, at times, some interesting depth and complexity to things, such as how people would react to a certain problem, mainly Bex, but at the same time, it muddled things as well in the search for drama.
At the end, things were obviously solved after some personal growing up, some overcoming issues and admitting things which were constricting the character's lives. But this is weird to talk about because although I appreciate the differences which make this story original, I still think a lot about the real life details and it can be complicated to disconnect the two things.
Still, as a fictional tale, it has good things but others elements I wasn't such a fan of.
Grade: 7/10
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