The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, of fashion blog Go Fug Yourself, wrote two YA novels between 2011 and 2013: Spoiled and Messy. Both focus on teen protagonists and Hollywood culture, and were published to great acclaim. Their newest collaboration is a little less YA and a little more NA (New Adult), and rather than focusing on Hollywood celebrity, they focus instead on royal celebrity. 

The Royal We is a thinly veiled fictionalization of the real-life relationship between Prince William and Kate Middleton. Here, they are Nick and Rebecca Porter (Bex), and the novel begins with their meeting at Oxford and carries them through to their eventual engagement. The engagement is not a surprise. In fact, the novel opens with Bex stating, "If you believe my unauthorized biography, The Bexicon, Nick fell in love with me at a pub on my first night at Oxford, and angels burst into song while rose petals fell from the sky." She is already deeply entrenched in royal celebrity at the beginning of the book, and the focus of the story is instead on building the ups and downs of their relationship, which spans from their auspicious meeting in an Oxford dorm to several years later, when they're in their mid-twenties. Bex has just traveled to Oxford to attend Pembroke College for a term, leaving her family back home in Iowa. Her family has achieved some success through her dad's invention of the Coucherator, a couch with a refrigerator in the bottom. 

While Cocks and Morgan stay fairly close to the real-life material they have to work with - Bex has a sister named Lacey, who is also in the headlines, while Nick's younger brother is Freddie - they do also take opportunities to invent new material and context for the romance narrative. It's also a fascinating look at royal celebrity, both the lifelong scrutiny Nick has received, and new fame Bex experiences by association. For example, Nick tells her, "I feel like I have to be so careful all the time. I have a non-hilarious conversation just once, and then the next day the papers write that I'm 'Nick the Prick,' because I wasn't grinning like a madman. But if I'm having too much fun, I'm a drunken lout." 

Nick and Bex start out as friends; everyone tells Bex that he'll never marry an American. But slowly their romance develops and Bex is whisked into a new world, where she has to worry about paparazzi and gossip blogs. And if Nick really won't marry an American, what happens to the years she's investing into dating him secretly?

The Royal We is an incredibly fun book, not just for the way it mirrors the real-life relationship of Will and Kate, but also as it invents new material and fleshes out secondary characters. But for anyone with any familiarity with the way Will and Kate's relationship tracked from college to the wedding, the novel creates a lot of entertainment by presenting a series of references that do have real-life significance.