Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
There is no reason to berate a book for failing to do things it never sets out to do. This is a romance novel, straight up. There are scenes that are affecting and work well. The writing in some of these scenes is solid. The naïveté of the whole can be explained by the fact that the book is a fairy tale about falling in love with a prince. These are not aspects of the novel that I admire because I don’t think they’re executed very well. But they work for a lot of people. For my taste, the book is sloppy in form and thin in character. It’s hard to believe in any of these people. It reads like the fan fiction that it so often references. The book simply didn’t work for me.