Pub Day! American Royalty by Tracey Livesay

June 27, 2022

by Tracey Livesay

This book is out TODAY!

Read my full review of it HERE.

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In theory, this is right up my alley. I love royal romances! I was excited that it was an interracial couple, intrigued by the similarities to Harry & Meghan. But in practice, I was bored stiff. Major yawn. I could not get into this. I ended up DNFing at 50%. I wanted to like the characters but never did, just didn’t enjoy the story, and thought the technical aspect of the writing could stand some improvement. It felt a little rudimentary and didn’t do anything 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 wanted to root for these people to get together. Once they started having a sexual relationship, I still couldn’t understand why they were interested in one another.

Circling back to the royal comparisons, if The Royal We gave us Will & Kate fanfic, this one is definitely trying to give us Harry & Meghan. In fact, the blurb on the back makes direct a comparison to Harry and 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 book is about a royal 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 & 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 into 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.

Both Dani and Jameson are looking for independence and autonomy, which I thought was a great way to introduce them that held a lot of potential. What they find is a physical attraction to one another despite not exactly getting off on the right foot. This part of the book just took forever to come together and kind of lost me.

I did appreciate that the story tackles topics like racism, misogyny/misogynoir, objectification, and hyper sexualization. I liked that the relationship was interracial - and that Jameson acknowledged and made an effort to learn about the cultural differences between him and Dani.

So aside from using Harry & Meghan to sell this book, it had a lot of potential but just didn’t live up to it in my opinion. But this is only my opinion and the things that turned me off may not be an issue for you. If it still sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think!