The King is Dead

Ooooo the royal drama! Secrets abound, racists are yelling, crushes are crushing, and James's head is heavy under that crown. Read if you like alternate-royal timelines with backstabbing and subterfuge galore. Very fun with a pleasantly surprising amount of emotional depth alongside the drama.

nnngh I really wanted to love this. I, a person who read ALL FOUR AMERICAN ROYALS books, was all here for a biracial gay British prince to ascend the throne. Unfortunately this prince makes the most questionable choices of all time constantly? Like yes I know YA characters should have room to make mistakes and grow but truly this 17-year-old is about to take over the whole country and he's fumbling around this blackmail scheme like a horny Rocky & Bullwinkle character. Truly abolish the monarchy.

But I could forgive that if it were more fun but somehow the pacing was off and it really dragged even though things kept happening including really wild coincidences that should have been more entertaining? Also all the characters are so flat. Just really not a fun reading experience. I was going to DNF but I heavy-skimmed the last half bc I did want to know how the plot turned out.

Truly vexing because I think it's a great plot idea and I'm here for calling out the racism of the British monarchy obviously, the execution is just so clumsy here.

I liked this book. I liked the story it was trying to tell.

Trying. To tell. This book had some really good themes and ideas and explored the effects of the Royal family really well, but I just think it could have been so much better in a different way.

So this book was a lot more pro royal than I was expecting. That's not exactly a bad thing, although supporting the Royal family does have a lot of pretty messed up implications, such as the acceptance that a random person is better than you simply for being born in a particular position. But that's fine, I guess. Even the epilogue, where James is about to get coronated and is happy about it is fine. But what I found pretty gross was the depiction of the people who were anti-royal only being so because they were racist and threatening their lives. I am most certainly anti-royal but this has nothing to do with their race or gender but simply because it is an utterly messed up position that we still uphold and I think its wrong to not mention those people who are against the monarchy but are not racist, violent bigots. I wish no harm on the Royal family, I just don't think they should hold any of the power that they do.

So, that aside, I did like a lot of the characters. Grigor was sweet, Gayle was interesting, and James' mum was a really appealing, intruiging character. Although I do think there may have been a few too many characters, which meant a lot of them didn't get much development, I still think the majority of the characters were very well done.

Except maybe for Eddie. To be honest, with all the potential this book had, it going with the obvious ‘Eddie hates James because he's second in line' was really disappointing. While his reasoning behind it was actually quite interesting, his sudden character change was jarring and ruined some of the meaning for me. this story went from being an interesting look at how James' priority by his parents affected his brother, to his brother being evil and kidnapping someone and completely in the wrong and James' parents didn't do anything wrong. I think this book would have benefitted a lot more from some moral ambiguity.

Also, the romance was done kind of weirdly, with Jonathan barely being in it, so the reader doesn't have much frame of reference for why James chooses Jonathan over Grigor, but it was alright.

Overall I enjoyed it, but The King is Dead had some major flaws that, if written differently, could have made this a much better book.