Reviews with content warning for Pedophilia - Red, White & Royal Blue

So it's 11am and I haven't slept in almost 24 hours, and that may have some sort of influence on how I'm feeling right now.

But all I know is that I had to take a break before going into the last chapter of this book, because I was in my kitchen, making a cup of tea, and it hit me just how fucking deeply this was touching me as a gay kid who grew up in a less-than-ideal environment. I was standing there at my kettle thinking about how indescribable it felt to read something so hopeful, so joyful, so everything-I-ever-wanted. And when I did psych myself up to getting to that last chapter and finishing it, I put the book down and out of nowhere I started crying. And that's a hell of an achievement, because I'm on medication that makes it damn hard to cry.

The afterword was the icing on top of the emotional fuckfest cake. You did exactly as you were hoping to. Thank you.

Details: Fixed POV, third-person, present tense
Favourite character: Boringly but for good reason, Alex and Henry
Happy ending?: Yes

Favourite quotes:

"Do either of y'all know what a viscount is?" June is saying, halfway through a cucumber sandwich. "I've met, like, five of them, and I keep smiling politely as if I know what it means when they say it. Alex, you took comparative international governmental relational things. Whatever. What are they?"

"I think it's that thing when a vampire creates an army of crazed sex waifs and starts his own ruling body," he says.

"That sounds right," Nora says.

"So, you can hate the heir to the throne all you want, write mean poems about him in your diary, but the minute you see a camera, you act like the sun shines out of his dick, and you make it convincing."

"Have you met Henry?" Alex says. "How am I supposed to do that? He has the personality of a cabbage."

Without missing a beat, he blurts out, "Bring them to the house."

"Where? Are you hiding a turkey habitat up your ass, son? Where, in our historically protected house, am I going to put a couple of turkeys until I pardon them tomorrow?"

"Put them in my room. I don't care."

She outright laughs. "No."

"How is it different from a hotel room? Put the turkeys in my room, Mom."

"I'm not putting the turkeys in your room."

"Put the turkeys in my room."

"No."

"Put them in my room, put them in my room, put them in my room--"

That night, as Alex stares into the cold, pitiless eyes of a prehistoric beast of prey, he has a few regrets.

THEY KNOW, he texts Henry. THEY KNOW I HAVE ROBBED THEM OF FIVE-STAR ACCOMMODATIONS TO SIT IN A CAGE IN MY ROOM, AND THE MINUTE I TURN MY BACK THEY ARE GOING TO FEAST ON MY FLESH.

Cornbread stares emptily back at him from inside a huge crate next to Alex's couch. A farm vet comes by once every few hours to check on them. Alex keeps asking if she can detect a lust for blood.

"History, huh? Bet we could make some."

"The phrase "see attached bibliography" is the single sexiest thing you have ever written to me."

"Why'd you pick him?" Alex asks. "I remember that campaign. We met a lot of people who would've made great politicians. Why wouldn't you pick someone easier to elect?"

"You mean, why'd I roll the rice on the gay one?"

Alex concentrates on keeping his face neutral.

"I wasn't gonna put it like that," he says, "but yeah."

"Raf ever tell you his parents kicked him out when he was sixteen?"

Alex winces. "I knew he had a hard time before college, but he didn't specify."

"Yeah, they didn't take the news so well. He had a rough couple of years, but it made him tough. The night we met him, it was the first time he'd been back in California since he got kicked out, but he was damn sure gonna come in to support a brother out of Mexico City. It was like when Zahra showed up at your mom's office in Austin and said she wanted to prove the bastards wrong. You know a fighter when you see one."

He takes his phone out and lines up a shot, Henry standing there all soft and rumpled and smiling next to one of the most exquisite works of art in the world.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm taking a picture of a national gay landmark," Alex tells him. "And also a statue."

"Give yourself away sometimes, sweetheart. There's so much of you."

"You listen to me," she says. Her jaw is set, ironclad. It's the game face he's seen her use to stare down Congress, to cow autocrats. Her grip on his hand is steady and strong. He wonders, half-hysterically, if this is how it felt to charge into war under Washington. "I am your mother. I was your mother before I was ever the president, and I'll be your mother long after, to the day they put me in the ground and beyond this earth. You are my child. So, if you're serious about this, I'll back your play."

Alex is silent.

But the debates, he thinks. But the general.

Her gaze is hard. He knows better than to say either of those things. She'll handle it.

"So," she says. "Do you feel forever about him?"

And there's no room left to agonize over it, nothing left to do but say the thing he's known all along.
"Yeah," he says. "I do."

Ellen Claremont exhales slowly, and she grins a small, secret grin, the crooked, unflattering one she never uses in public, the one he knows best from when he was a kid around her knees in a small kitchen in Travis Country.

"Then fuck it."

"So, imagine we're all born with a set of feelings. Some are broader or deeper than others, but for everyone, there's that ground floor, a bottom crust of the pie. That's the maximum depth of feeling you've ever experienced. And then the worst thing happens to you. The very worst thing that could have happened. The thing you had nightmares about as a child, and you thought, it's alright because that thing will happen to me when I'm older and wiser, and I'll have felt so many feelings by then that this one worst feeling, the worst possible feeling, won't seem so terrible.

But it happens to you when you're young. It happens when your mind isn't even fully done cooking -- when you've barely experienced anything, really. The worst thing is one of the first big things that ever happens to you in your life. It happens to you, and it goes all the way down to the bottom of what you know how to feel, and it rips it open and carves out this chasm down below to make room. And because you were so young, and because it was one of the first big things to happen in your life, you'll always carry it inside you. Every time something terrible happens to you from then on, it doesn't just stop at the bottom -- it goes all the way down."

Content Warnings