Playing the Palace looked camp right in the eye!

 

So, there are books that certain part of BookTok (the book community on TikTok) I see talking about a lot, and one of those is Red, White and Royal Blue (RWaRB). Now, I’ve already read that, and it’s not actually what I’m talking about today. No, the book I’m talking about is Playing the Palace by Paul Rudnick.

However, I bring up RWaRB since, and I don’t know whether it was an intentional choice or not, but the cover of Playing the Palace immediately reminded me of RWaRB. I normally include an image of the cover of the book I’m talking about, so you’ll see the cover of this book, and you can look up RWaRB for yourself, but you’ll see what I mean. Not only that, but Playing the Palace gave me very much the same concept as RWaRB: American gets into relationship with British royal. The only immediate difference is that in RWaRB, it’s the son of the president of the US, and in Playing the Palace, it’s an event planner. Now, what also doesn’t help is how similar the royals look as well. They both just happen to be gingers and happen to be wearing the same thing? Again: not sure whether the similarities were intentional or not, but I can’t help but bring them up.

Still, to how I normally start these posts: The Blurbie Goes Bananas! There’s a lot of blurb – two full paragraphs. The abridged version is that main character, Carter Ogden, has been cheated on. He meets the openly gay Prince Edgar at an event organised by his boss, and they allegedly have sparks. But then the media catches wind of this romance (bit of a jump there), everyone seems to have an opinion on this romance – including the Queen of England (and her famous tornado blowjobs). Basically, Carter and Edgar have to fight for their happy ending. Now, I can’t lie… I don’t know a single British person named Edgar. Edward, sure, that’s a name in circulation in the royal family, but Edgar? Prison, honey…

But the very first thing I want to mention about this book is that it’s camp. I don’t know whether it was meant to be camp, but it’s camp, and you shouldn’t take it too seriously. It took me a while as I was reading to realise that, but once I did, it changed my experience.

So, page two of this book showed me the word “smoothy”. I realise it’s just another spelling of “smoothie”. But I’m just going to say, seeing smoothie spelled with a “y” does not look correct. From Googling, it seems to be an American spelling, and sure, that’s fine. But, Mary, it just doesn’t look right, even though there’s nothing wrong with it.

Also, this whole book gave me very fanfiction vibes – which isn’t a bad thing, let me mention. Like, Carter, approaching 30, is an event planner living with his two roommates, Adam and Louise, Adam is a Broadway dancer, and Louise is a writer. That sounds fanfiction-y to me. And I suppose, just the concept of this book is quite fanfiction. In the second chapter, Carter basically puts out into the universe that he wants a big life, wants to fall in love and pretty much wants to stay himself. And then in chapter three, he spends a hot moment saying how he hates Prince Edgar because he’s presented as this paragon of gay perfection. But the third chapter ends with someone with a “distinctly British accent” tapping Carter on the shoulder. From these first three chapters, I got a very Hallmark movie vibe. Also, in that fanfiction vibe, it’s obviously a fictional world, but like, the shows that are mentioned, some are real, like Drag Race and Game of Thrones get mentioned, but then The Great British Baking Jubilee gets mentioned, and why not just say Bake Off, because we all know what you mean, and other, real, shows have already been mentioned… Why even make up a fake show?

And I will say, the Hallmark movie vibe carried on throughout the book. Not that that’s a bad thing per se. Are Hallmark movies predictable and all the same? Yes. But there’s clearly an audience since so many get put out. And in that Hallmark movie vibe, there were definitely moments where both Carter and Edgar felt a little two-dimensional. There’s one moment, near the beginning of the book, where Carter and Edgar are on a date – this isn’t really a spoiler, since the blurb mentions their romance. But they’re on a date at this fancy five-star restaurant, and Carter does that thing where he’s like, “Erm, actually I’m from New Jersey, so all this hoity-toity stuff isn’t me.” But then he gets Edgar’s people to take them to an IHOP and, this is a quote from the book, Edgar says, “And what precisely is this establishment?” Like, ma’am, you want me to believe this nearly 30-year-old prince doesn’t know what an IHOP is? I could understand him having never gone to one, but not even knowing what IHOP is? No. I don’t believe that. My point here is that sometimes the characters felt like caricatures of people, instead of real people.

There was one point where Carter took Edgar to his (Carter’s) sister’s wedding. And it was nice to see Edgar basically getting humanised, as he was getting attacked with embarrassing questions by Carter’s relatives, as you would hope would happen to someone’s date at a wedding. There’s a bit where Carter’s sister fully goes off at Edgar, it was kind of a slay, I won’t lie. I honestly really loved the wedding era of the book, my only issue was that when Edgar was talking to Carter’s parents, this was when Rudnick took the opportunity to sort of info-dump about his parents, instead of letting the parent’s actions and words speak for themselves. Like, given that the only thing that Carter’s dad did throughout the book was give historical facts, there was no need for an infodump about him – and honestly, he could have been cut from the book completely in my opinion. He added nothing.

But to stay on the embarrassment train, there was a moment where Carter managed to bring Edgar to his apartment, and his roommates had made him a gift basket of just awful things with limp royal ties. Like a can of spaghetti sauce, because the brand was Prince’s, Burger King crowns, and a sex toy called the Royal Reamer. And I’ll admit… I may have or may have not laughed at this. And this was the energy that I wanted throughout the book. This is a point where the characters felt real. That’s what normal people do to their friends: Embarrass them in front of their dates, even if their date is a prince.

Anyway, then Carter ends up going and staying in Buckingham Palace and meeting the Queen of England. Although, it’s Queen Catherine in this book, not Miss Lizzy that we’ve got now. But in this book, she spoke like a Disney or fantasy villain for some reason.

Carter ends up under a lot of public scrutiny, obviously. I feel like that was just going to be a part of the book, so I wasn’t surprised when most of the conflict in this book did surround that, and how he and Edgar dealt with it. But really, when it’s the trope of, as this book specifically says, “the prince and the peon”, what else was it going to be? Although, there’s one main, bigger, source of conflict that, I’ll say, the order of things was weird. I won’t specifically spoil what it is, but basically what happened was that we were told this big thing happened, Carter then thinks to himself, “That didn’t happen, did it?” and then we’re given the recollection that it did in fact happen. And the conflict itself, that I didn’t have a problem with, but the ordering was weird. Like, why not show us the source of the conflict first, so we as the readers can have that, “Oh no, is it going to happen? Is it not?” moment, instead of the “Lol this mess happened but we’re not showing you” that happened in the book. It was another one of those moments where I noticed this book did a lot of telling, rather than showing.

But you know what? Even with all this complaining I’m apparently doing, I can’t say I didn’t end up enjoying this book. I don’t know what happened while I was reading it, but at some point, I eventually just stopped taking it seriously, and every time something outlandish or dumb happened I just went, “You know what? Sure.” And when I did that, I just started enjoying myself honestly. Would I say this is a good book? I think I’d agree more with the 3.2-star rating it has on Goodreads compared to the 4.1 it has on Amazon. So, I wouldn't say it's good, but I enjoyed it once I stopped taking it seriously.

I’d say that you should go into this book with zero expectations. Don’t expect it to be good, or highbrow. Go in expecting stupid and camp, and then you’ll have an okay to good time with it.

Okay, bye!