Early Review: American Royalty by Tracey Livesay

 American Royalty 

by Tracey Livesay

Pub date: June 28, 2022

🚫 DNF @ 50% 🚫

Because I did not finish this book, I don't want to call this a review, but I do have a lot of thoughts which I have constructed as coherently as possible below. If you read this book, I'd love to know your thoughts on it!

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So if The Royal We gave us Will & Kate fanfic, this one is giving us Harry & Meghan - or trying to. In fact, the blurb on the back of the book makes a direct comparison to Harry & Meghan's royal romance. I just have to say that right from the very first page, there is little similarity between the book's FMC "Duchess" and Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. The book is about a British prince who marries a Black American woman and that's pretty much the only similarity as far as I could tell.

Dani "Duchess" Nelson is a rapper and hip-hop star who is more akin to Cardi B. Her lyrics are raunchy, her videos are lewd. But she's tired of the powerlessness and objectification she's subjected to within the music industry. She's ready to leave it all behind to put her full attention on her successful skin care business. 

Prince Jameson, Duke of Wessex, is the analogue for Prince Harry, and we know this because 1) he doesn't want to be part of the Royal Family, and 2) one of his parents was tragically killed in an accident when he was a teen. I was going to say these are thinly veiled parallels but there is no veil.

Both Dani and Jameson are looking for independence and autonomy, which I thought was an excellent way to find common ground between them and held quite a lot of potential for their story and their characters. What they find is a physical attraction to one another despite not exactly getting off on the right foot.

In theory, this is right up my alley. I love royal romances! I love reading about the actual Royal Family. I was excited that this was an interracial couple, intrigued by the similarities to Harry & Meghan. But in practice, I was bored stiff. I could not get into it. I wanted to like the characters but never did. Prince Jameson especially was rather a let-down. I didn't really get into the story and even by the halfway point it didn't feel like it had really gotten started. I thought even the technical aspect of the writing could stand some improvement. It felt a little rudimentary and did nothing to elevate the material. There were no romantic parts in the first half of the book, and the sexy parts were... weird. I never got to a point where I was rooting for these two to get together. Once they started having a sexual relationship, I still couldn't understand why they were interested in one another. 

I did appreciate that the story tackles topics like misogyny/misogynoir, objectification, hyper sexualization, and other important issues. I also liked that Jameson acknowledged and made an effort to learn about the cultural differences between himself and Dani. This has a lot to say about a LOT of hugely important topics relevant to us all but especially Black women and that we definitely need more of.

[Side note: In Alexis Hall's Rosaline Palmer Takes the Cake, Hall contrasts the two male love interests of Rosaline's by putting them in the same situation at different points in the book to show us how differently each one handles it. Rosaline becomes intimate with Alain (who we slowly realize is not as good a guy as he wants everyone to think). During the scene they realize they don't have a condom. Alain ends the evening and leaves. During a similar situation later in the book with Harry, Harry decides that they can do other things that don't require a condom. The reader is tacitly asked to compare how the two men handled this same problem in very different ways and to think about what those decisions say about their characters. In their first sexual encounter, Dani and Jameson find themselves in this exact circumstance. And how does Jameson choose to handle it? He gets up and walks out. It may not be right to judge a character this way but it just reminded me too much of Alain from Rosaline Palmer. It was one more nail in the coffin of my opinion of Jameson. Even if I understand why he acted like that, I didn't like it.]

So this book obviously wasn't for me, but I hesitate to dissuade anyone else from trying it. The things that turned me off may not bother other readers, and the reasons that I didn't personally connect with the characters may not apply to you. So if you still think this sounds appealing, by all means try it! Not every book is for every reader. Just because I didn't care for it (and keep in mind I read only half) doesn't mean you won't like it. These are only my opinions.

Thank you to NetGalley and Avon/Harper Voyager for providing the digital ARC.