What a weird royal saga with a pragmatic point of view on relationships, gives in to the British stereotypes. I think I expected more of a sweeping romance with both of these books in the series. What we get is a juicy look into what is theorized what being a royal is like. There's a fun aspect to it when you try to connect real life tabloid headlines with the direction the book took on the characters plot points. The actual romance was a hard look into rebuilding a relationship while being a royal, spoiler alert, it's hard. Bet and Nick are reeling from the fallout of their wedding and the reveal about Freddie. That was the hardest part to read, it was excruciating to have them try to put band aid after band aid on it and eventually it blew up in their faces and then took a decidedly very odd turn. The heir affair speaks to baby bump watch and it gets a little dark here. I'm glad they took an honest look at infertility and baby expectations but then it got too weird and outlandish. I think what saves this book for me is the authenticity of the characters and all of the wonderfully delightful side characters. They breathe so much life and levity to a heavy book. I loved reading about Bea, Gemma, Cilla, Gar Eleanor, Agatha, Lacey, etc. IT actually takes a village to get us to the end of the together and much like the first in the series it drops us off in a nice but unfulfilling place.

The Heir Affair is another knockout by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan.  After I read The Royal We, I could not wait for more of the story with Bex, Nick, and Freddie.  This delivered and was compelling.  A little long winded in some parts but overall I couldn't put it down and needed to know what happens next! We are in a pandemic, so I appreciated the extra length but it could have been a little shorter.

"The Heir Affair" is the sequel to "The Royal We." I was a HUGE fan of The Royal We, reading and devouring the audiobook version. The characters maintain their authentic voices, real emotions, and are very relatable. This book has a less overarching romantic tone and deals with much more serious life and family issues. I found the book overall enjoyable but a little heavier than "The Royal We." Overall, I would definitely recommend this book to friends, family, and patrons of the library.

As a big fan of the Royal We, I was worried the sequel wouldn't fare well by comparison. I was thrilled to find the Heir Affair had all the fun of the original with added emotional depth.

I finished The Heir Affair the first week of June and it’s taken me forever to write a review! I loved this sequel to The Royal We but not as much as the first one of course!⠀
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I was provided an #arc of #TheHeirAffair by @netgalley so thank you for this! I absolutely loved the book.⠀
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The Heir Affair takes place right after the end of The Royal We and follows the Royal couple through their first few years of marriage. It’s difficult work adjusting to royalty and the public eye, as well as being married and this was so perfectly communicated through the story. These authors are a super duo and this was a perfect continuation and wrap up of Nick and Bex’s story.⠀
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I also love these books because I feel like I know a *tiny* bit of what it’s like to be a princess and in the public eye. It’s so fascinating seeing how the Royal family works and even though it’s fiction!
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My six word review:⠀
It’s like having the inside scoop!⠀
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The Royal We was 5 stars and I loved The Heir Affair but because I was comparing it to book one, The Heir Affair is ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ stars!

CW: infertility, miscarriage, TTC

I enjoyed this, but parts of it moved slow and it felt that the book could have been shorter. It was missing some of the magic that the Royal We had. But, it was still a lot of fun and I loved getting to see these characters again.

In this sequel to 'The Royal We,' Nick and Bex are hiding out in Scotland, desperate to start over and stay out of the media. After a scandalous affair is announced to the public on the morning of their wedding, the couple begins to teeter on the edge of a cliff, and it only gets worse after they return to their home. Nick begins to distance himself, and his relationship with Freddie is completely wrecked. Bex doesn't know what to do anymore. Problem after problem continues to pile up, and more secrets begin to get let out. Will the trouble ever end? Or will relationships continue to get destroyed without any hope for reconciliation?

This book had me hooked from the very first chapter. With 'The Royal We,' it took a little while for me to get into it, but because of the connections I already had with these characters from the first book, I was able to fly through this sequel easily. The drama, the secrets, the love, it was all so captivating, and I just want more! I am absolutely in love with Nick and Freddie, and I enjoyed watching their dynamic with Bex. I loved this book overall, and I am so sad to see this story end. Tears did in fact pool up in my eyes as I read the last two chapters. I absolutely recommend this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for providing an ARC of this book!

This is the long awaited sequel to The Royal We. Five years is a long time between books, especially when the second book begins only a few weeks after the first ends and assumes the reader has just finished the first. So, two things up front: (1) make sure you read The Royal We before The Heir Affair or you will be lost and (2) if you don’t remember the first book after five years, reread at least the last few chapters. 

If you liked the first book, you’ll like this one. It’s a cute take on the present British aristocracy with a few changes. So few, that I was picturing most of the characters as members of the current royal family. This is royal fan fiction, pure and simple. However, it is for the most part a fun and light story, perfect for a beach read. 

My copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. My thanks to the the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review it.

Fun follow up to the Royal We by the same author . Unfortunately you need to read the Royal Wevto get the gist of this one.

I really enjoyed the continued character development of this sequel. I found that the authors kept me guessing at every turn, and I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome! It's tough to find authors who don't just simply end the story with a textbook, predictable happy ending, and it was very refreshing.

Really fun sequel to The Royal We, it’s a fast, mostly light and frothy, read. Sometimes laugh out loud funny, especially in scenes with Bex and Eleanor. Nice resolutions for most of our favorite characters from the last book.

The Royal We was a great read that caught me by surprise.  Pure fluff and mindless entertainment.  Fun fan fiction about the royal family.  I had low expectations going into that book, and then I was so pleasantly surprised to find it so addicting and enjoyable.

So when I started the sequel, The Heir Affair, I had slightly higher expectations given how much I enjoyed the first book.  But the sequel did not quite live up to my expectations.  I did enjoy getting back together with these characters and finding out more about what happened after the wedding.  There are some really great moments in this book!  But the book was just excessively long and the great moments were bogged down by a lot of unnecessary talk.  The hardcover is 480 pages long, and I felt like that was at least 150 pages too long.  While I enjoyed some parts, at other times I felt like the book may never end.  If you liked The Royal We, I do think it is worth reading The Heir Affair as well.  But I definitely enjoyed the first book more.

I do think that Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan should perhaps look into careers as fortune tellers.  When The Royal We was written, the idea that an American would marry into the British royal family was just the stuff of fan fiction.  Until it really happened!  The Heir Affair was written before Harry and Meghan decided to break away from the royal family, but it details a scenario that is very similar.  So crazy!

Thanks to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for sending me an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.  This book will be available on July 7!

The Heir Affair is the super dishy, dramatic, and fun sequel that fans of The Royal We have been begging for. This is pure escapist literature that lets you sink into the inner workings of the royal family. Bex and Nick are dealing with the fallout from the scandal in book one and this book offers lots of other scandalous plotlines. This book also provides more background on other characters who we didn't get to know much about in the first book.

Thanks to @grandcentralpub, @fuggirls, and @netgally for my copy of The Heir Affair!

The Heir Affair is the sequel to The Royal We, and it was just delightful.  It picks up right where The Royal We left off, with Rebecca Porter (Bex) and Prince Nicholas hiding away from the press in Scotland.  An emergency calls them back to London, where they come face to face with the litany of issues that they ran from, including Nick’s brother Freddie.  With humor and some dark moments, we see Bex and Nick through some very interesting moments as secrets come to light in the royal family.

I was hooting and chuckling through a lot of the book, but was so impressed with how the authors balanced the humor with the very serious content in the book.  Bex and Nick faced some very intense moments as a couple throughout the plot.  Another fabulous facet of the book was how the authors built up the relationships between people and how much depth that they went into.  My favorite two were Bex and Freddie, along with Bex and the Queen.  Both were full of humor, but had some intense, deep moments.  One of my favorite parts had to be when Bex taught the queen about Cubs baseball. 

Grab this book on July 7th, and get ready to sit down and read it quickly.  You won’t want to stop once you get into it!

TW: miscarriage, infertility

Are you a fan of book series that continue shortly after the first book ended?

There are times where I never wanted the story to end and then there are times I wanted to form my own conclusions. With this sequel, a part of me wishes the authors took a different route and not made a continuation from the first book. I really liked The Royal We. I thought it was playful and entertaining without being cliche or predictable. There was a feeling of fantasy mixed in with relatable reality. At the end of the story I wasn’t rooting for the future king and his bride, I was rooting for Nick and Bex. With this book, they took the one part of their story I didn’t enjoy and made a whole book out of it.

Honestly I wasn’t a fan of the eluded love triangle. It seemed to come out of nowhere in The Royal We. I didn’t enjoy how Bex was portrayed in the first couple of chapters in The Heir Affair. She spent a majority of her time between Freddie and Nick trying to find a balance that was unobtainable and trying to fix or take blame for a situation and not understanding why they all couldn’t be one big happy family. This book took a fantasy and made it a dark reality. She was being punished for something out of her hands and I hated the situation she was in. The first book was magical and provided this love that seemed unbreakable, but this book broke my heart. 

There were parts of this book I really loved, one of them being Freddie. I really loved the raw emotion he gave throughout this whole book.  I never saw him as a prince, but rather I saw him as a tangible human. He wasn’t this unrelatable person or this fantasy. He was the lost down to earth character throughout this whole story and my heart felt for him every step of his journey. I really wish he was the lead in this book. I would have loved to have seen his journey or his side of this story. 

I did appreciate how they explored real life situations that all married couples go through. It brought to life the struggles of infertility and the struggles many people have gone through in the hopes of conceiving a child. The writing was really well done. The story was imaginative and playful while pulling emotional strings and bringing to light tough situations. My favorite thing these authors did was make these fictional characters seem like your best friends in real life.

The entanglement of lies made this book a lot of drama I didn’t not want. It was good, but it was really emotionally taxing. I really did enjoy this book, though I wish things were done differently.  I really liked that this one seemed more reality and less of a fantasy story.  Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for this ARC.

I loved The Royal We and was very excited for The Heir Affair.  This book is everything I wanted it to be and more.  A great sequel that manages to avoid cliches and predictability while still being sexy, cozy and so much fun.

I've been reading the authors' blog, Go Fug Yourself, since it was a Typepad site, circa 2006. I've read all their other works, the first two of which were aimed at a YA audience (but in a smart, pop-culture-obsessed way). I liked the predecessor to this book, The Royal We, quite a lot, as it still sort of felt like a 90210-ish soap opera even as it took on more mature themes. So I wasn't quite prepared how much this book would gut me with its exploration of infidelity (emotional and otherwise), infertility, grief, and manipulative family members. (Perhaps my family is more like The Firm than I thought!) But it was still an engaging read.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for an ARC for the purpose of review.

The sequel to The Royal We, out July 7th, was definitely different than I expected, in the best way possible. Beginning with the aftermath of the marriage of Bex and Nick, we’re taken on another journey that includes drama, deceit, secrets, and lies, but also love, celebration, baseball (go Cubs!), and so much more. I found myself putting this book down the past few days because I didn’t want the story to end. Here’s hoping for a third in the series! 

This book felt like the older sister to The Royal We. It was not as happy-go-lucky, honeymoon-phase, party-time as the first, but dealt with real life problems, actions, and consequences. Don’t get me wrong, I still swooned and shrieked out loud while reading this (and definitely cried multiple times), but it felt much more like real life (as real as it can get being apart of the royal family, I suppose). I especially loved the character development and getting deeper peaks into the lives of some characters from the first novel. And obviously my love for Nick and Bex will never die.

My one minor critique of this book was occasionally the writing. I would sometimes have to re-read portions because it seemed to jump around to different times at point.

The Heir Affair picks up right where The Royal We left off - we're dropped into the middle of the fallout from Nick, Bex, and Freddie's alleged royal love triangle. The scandal was major, and one the family nor the public will easily forget. After their disastrous wedding, Nick and Bex have to prove to everyone that they are the solid couple they're supposed to be, which is easier said than done.

Y'ALL. I could absolutely cry. This was EVERY BIT the sequel I wanted. I was shocked and giddy when I was approved for a galley from Netgalley & Grand Central Publishing - literally dancing around my apartment. This was major, people.

You could smash this book together with the first, and I wouldn't even bat an eye - they move perfectly from one to the next. Pluss, I think the authors here are excellent with their pacing and the way they seamlessly jump forward and incorporate flashbacks - it could easily feel clunky and disorienting but there's such a nice flow to the book.

These books to me are so cozy. We get so much detail and its as fun to relish in the small moments (i.e. Nick's new knitting hobby) as it is the larger life events. It was so easy to fall back into the lives of some of my favorite characters - it felt like I was back with my buddies (Gaz, in particular). Everyone felt so consistent with who we knew from the first, and it was lovely to catch up with them and see how they continud to grow.

Along with catching up with old characters, I was glad we got much more of some of TRW's more secondary characters. We get so much more about Eleanor (lol @ the queen being a secondary character) as well as Richard, and I'm already excited to re-read The Royal We (again) knowing more about those two characters in particular. 

The ONLY thing I would say I didn't love is that the book got a touch too soap opera for me - but hey, its a book about royals, and I think that world is probably full of soap opera secrets and stories. Overall, I LOVED this sequel and I know I will turn to it and its predecessor as comfort reads for years.

A HUGE thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review!

3.75 stars rounded up to 4. 

The sequel to the basically-Kate-Middleton-fanfic "The Royal We"  is compulsively readable and so much fun. Cocks and Morgan are witty writers who've peppered this book with lots of references to their website and fanbase. There are a couple of twists that enhance the soapiness of the story without being cliched. 
My big gripe is that I really hate the way they used Freddie. He was fun and complicated (again, in a really soapy way) in the first book, but his character continues to be this sad-sack punching bag. He's never given room to catch a break and is continually used as a plot device to solve the inherent problems of Bex and Nick's relationship. I suppose the reason I feel so strongly about these characters is a testament to how richly drawn they and their world are.