The Royal We
Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan, 2015
Grand Central Publishing
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455557103
Summary
I might be Cinderella today, but I dread who they'll think I am tomorrow. I guess it depends on what I do next.
American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasized about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune.
Yet it's Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Great Britain's future king. And when Bex can't resist falling for Nick, the person behind the prince, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit, under a spotlight she is not prepared to face.
Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick's sparkling and far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is much thornier and more tragic than anyone on the outside knows.
The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he's fated to become.
Which is how she gets into trouble.
Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she's sacrificed for love-her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself-will have been for nothing. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan are authors and owners of the blog Go Fug Yourself. The two met when they were working as recappers for the website Television Without Pity, then known as Mighty Big TV. Morgan and Cocks initially created the site as a diversion for themselves and their friends, but it quickly became popular and well known.
Fug Madness
Each March, in an homage to the NCAA "March Madness" Championship, Morgan and Cocks present a tournament featuring those celebrities deemed to have made the worst fashion faux pas in the previous calendar year. Each match-up is presented as a poll in which readers can vote on which celebrity has made "fuglier" fashion choices.
The inaugural 2008 tournament was won by Bai Ling, who defeated Victoria Beckham in the final match. Subsequent winners have included Aubrey O'Day (2009), Amber Rose (2010), Taylor Momsen (2011), Vanessa Hudgens (2012), Justin Bieber (2013), and Miley Cyrus (2014).
The Fug Awards
Morgan and Cocks co-authored The Fug Awards, which features a number of "honors" offered to the worst offenders in celebrity fashion, along with commentary similar to that found on the site. The book was released on February 6, 2008.
Novels
Morgan and Cocks co-authored Spoiled, a young adult novel about what happens when a Midwestern girl learns that her father is actually the most famous movie star in the world, and goes to live with him and her half-sister in Los Angeles. The book was published in 2011. The book's follow-up, Messy was published in 2012.
Morgan and Cocks's first adult novel, The Royal We, said to be loosely based on the courtship between Kate Middleton and Prince William, was published in 2015.
Media attention
Go Fug Yourself was named one of Entertainment Weekly's 25 favorite entertainment sites in its June 23, 2006 issue. In 2005 it was named one of the 50 Coolest Websites by Time magazine and one of the Top 100 Best Things of the Year by CBC. It was named one of the 50 Most Powerful Blogs by the UK's Guardian in March 2008. It has also been mentioned in Vanity Fair, Elle, Business Week Online, Harper's Bazaar, Chicago Tribune, and Newsweek, among others. The authors also blog regularly as "The Fug Girls" in New York Magazine. The Fug Girls also appeared on Season Three Episode Five of All on the Line, a Sundance channel series, offering feedback to struggling fashion designer Brooke Rodd. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/2/2015.)
Book Reviews
Smart, funny.... [Cocks and Morgan] write like the pros they've become.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
The characters should all be familiar: the heir to the British throne, his mischievous younger brother, his granny and the pretty commoner he meets in college. But in this version by bloggers Cocks and Morgan (a.k.a. the Fug Girls), the girl is American. Nick and Bex's love story is so fun and dishy, you'll hope for a sequel—with royal babies.
People
In the grand tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld's American Wife . . . A breezy, juicy novel that's like The Princess Diaries with fewer made-up countries and more sex-the kind of book you can imagine Pippa sneaking into Kensington Palace.
Entertainment Weekly
Every bit as engrossing as the real Kate and Will.... The pages turn as easily as a tabloid feature on the royal couple-and you'll end up just as obsessed with Bex and Nick as you already are with Wills and Kate.
Glamour
Cocks and Morgan tackled their first dip into mainstream fiction for adults and nailed it. The Royal We is a wonderful tale of young love, peppered with animated characters, difficult hardships and self-discovery
Romance Times Book Reviews
Cocks and Morgan, the bloggers behind Go Fug Yourself, charm readers with this modern-day Cinderella tale.... [T]he authors create their own unique and endearing characters...along with an entertaining cast of characters....[A] sparkling tale. Pure fun.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The authors hit all the right notes in this funny, smart, emotional tale that will definitely appeal to fans of Jojo Moyes.
Library Journal
[R]oyal watchers will appreciate the craftsmanship that went into fitting the fictional Lyons dynasty into the timeline of the existing monarchy. Some of the details are invented while others are tweaked.... Pages of biting humor and breathtaking glamour rewrite a fairy tale into something more satisfying than a stack of tabloids.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Some obvious starting places for a discussion, however, might be:
1. What did you find humorous in the book?
2. How close to the real royals are the characters in The Royal We? Can you tell which parts of the plot are real in the book...and which are fictional?
3. Does this book touch on any of your own fantasies?
4. If you ever attracted the eye of a prince, would you be willing to give up a large portion of your life to marry into a royal family? Or would you gain more then you lose?
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)