Red, White & Royal Blue

Some books the desk admires. This one we are glad exists. Red, White & Royal Blue is the happiest political fantasy in modern romance (the First Son of the United States falls for a British prince) and Casey McQuiston writes it with a conviction that turns a tabloid premise into the real thing: a book about public life and private truth, and what it costs to bring the two into alignment.

It begins, as the best ones do, with hostility. Alex Claremont-Diaz and Prince Henry loathe each other in the specialised way of two very visible young men who have each decided the other is a symbol rather than a person. A cake-related international incident forces a staged friendship for the cameras, and the staged friendship does what staged friendships in this genre are contractually obliged to do — except McQuiston plays every beat with such wit and such sincerity that the machinery disappears. The emails alone are worth the price of the book: two people falling in love in writing, quoting history's great letter-writers at each other, being unbearably clever because cleverness is the only safe way to say the true thing. We reread the emails. Everyone rereads the emails.

The spine here is that the stakes are real. This is a queer love story conducted in the crosshairs of two governments and a global press, and McQuiston never pretends the closet is a plot device rather than a pressure. There is fear in this book, and calculation, and a mother who is also a president and must briefly be both at once in a scene we consider one of the finest parental moments in the genre. But the register the book always returns to is joy (defiant, generous, chaotic joy) and that choice feels less like escapism than like an argument: that the happy ending is a political statement, and the book intends to make it.

Honest notices from the desk. The politics are an optimistic alternate timeline and know it — treat the White House as a fairy-tale castle with better polling data. The pacing gallops; a few side characters exist to be delightful, and succeed. Spice is present, warm, and handled with care.

Who is this for? Fourth on our Start Here list because it is the door marked joy. The book we hand to readers who need to know the genre has room for them, and to anyone whose week requires repair. It is funny, it is brave in the places that count, and it believes (audibly, on every page) that love is worth the scandal. The desk concurs.