Book review: Royal Spin
Authors: Omid Scobie and Robin Benway
Journalist Omid Scobie has attracted a lot of controversy for his reporting and alleged relationships with the British royals — or ex-royals — and for the books he wrote about Prince William and Meghan Markle’s exit from the royal fold; Finding Freedom and Endgame. Co-writer Robin Benway has previously only written young adult fiction so Royal Spin was a genre departure for both of them.
Synopsis
Twenty-something Lauren Morgan is moving up fast in the White House press office where she works until she catches her best friend and boyfriend in a tryst that has actually been going on for quite some time. So, she runs away and accepts a sudden job offer at Buckingham Palace.
After transplanting her life to London, she is quickly entangled in the palace’s back-of-house madness which includes two potential and problematic romantic propositions.
Reviewer’s thoughts
I am not a fan of royal romance or love triangle tropes. I would have been happy to give this one a miss but the publisher sent it to me as a freebie and I was in between the books I wanted, so I gave it a go.
The story is a typical romantic fantasy and has a good dose of escapism and intriguing innuendo about which real royals the fictional versions are based on but the story lacks tension.
Everything comes too easy for the protagonist. She has some childhood trauma that becomes a brief point of plot tension and she’s had a heartbreak but after that the ride is so smooth that when she has massive meltdowns about small bumps she becomes more annoying than likeable.
Every time the novel starts to build a bit of narrative tension it gets resolved almost as instantly which builds to a very anticlimactic ending.
In a romance novel, one is expecting at least one good climax.
The only consolation was that I liked the guy she chose in the end.
Spice level: salt and pepper
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