It's great to be in a position to recommend much more diverse books to our young people at school. Building the senior school library as a place where students actually come and find books that they want to read as opposed to books that teachers think they ought to read is an important responsibility and one we take really seriously.
Books like this are such a positive move as they will appeal to a broader set of readers than we are usually attracting. Dealing with modern issues in a clear and captivating way with a strong narrative voice and characters that the students can relate to is critical as we move forwards. This book is both an intelligent and compelling read that will hold even the most reluctant reader's attention and keep them turning the pages long into the night. It keeps the reader on their toes and ensures that you give it your full attention too. I found myself thinking about its characters and events even when I wasn't reading it and looking forward to snatching kore time with it and I hope that my students feel the same. An accessible, gripping and engrossing read that I can't recommend highly enough. Will absolutely be buying a copy for the library and heartily recommending it to both staff and students.

A story of two troubled teenagers from different worlds that collide in the 80’s. Steven is a working class boy, bullied by his father & others for being gay - even though he hasn’t decided if he is, Jasmine is privileged but neglected. One night they meet in hospital & click. Their friendship changes their lives. The story is poignant & moving.
I was given a copy to read by NetGalley and the publishers in return for my unbiased review.

I did enjoy this book, I did. But will I remember it? Probably not. Maybe because it's been such a stand out year for books that this one will just fall behind. Or maybe it's because it was just something out of nothing.
There wasn't a massive amount to enjoy about this book, but one of the things was the character called Jasmine. She was a whirlwind. She was the highlight of this book. She was so well written and was a pure joy to read, yet you could feel this underlying sadness to her. Her ending was so heartbreaking, but it needed to end that way.
Without her, this book would've been dull. The main character didn't have much personality at all. There certainly wasn't much plot, that didn't involve Jasmine, him being beaten by his father was pushed aside after Jasmine came in the picture.
This book is classed as LGBTQ+ because he's questioning his sexuality but even that wasn't explored too much. This book has the opportunity to be great, but unfortunately missed the mark.
It was one of those books that didn't have much plot but relied heavily on it's characters, but only one could live up to it and it just wasn't enough to save this book. It has a sense of one the those books that captures an epic moment in time, but for me, it fails to do that.
Would I recommend this book? Probably not, it just wasn't good enough. I have a feeling in the future I'll be thinking what a great character Jasmine was but not remembering what book she was from.
Thanks for Netgalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for gifting me with a copy of this book in return for an honest, unbiased review. It comes out October 31st.

Imagine if Jeanette Winterson wrote episodes of Made in Chelsea, and set them in the eighties? You’d have Royals by Emma Forrest.

Royals opens with 18-year-old Steven, preparing for a street party to celebrate the wedding of Lady Diana and Prince Charles. Steven is obsessed with fashion, and dreams of leaving behind his working-class upbringing to become a designer. Steven’s mum is his greatest supporter, and his father is a violent alcoholic.

He was jealous of me and Mum. It upset him that I made her happy. He wanted her to be happy, but he didn’t know how to do it himself. He bought her perfume on her birthday and he hit her. He got her kitchen remodelled, and he hit her.

As Di and Charles start their three-week honeymoon, Steven recovers from one of his father’s beatings in hospital. There he meets fellow patient, Jasmine. She’s a heiress, beautiful and deeply troubled (suicidal tendencies and a father who has ‘…extended absences and celebrated reappearances‘).

Jasmine sweeps Steven into her dazzling world and as the weeks unfold (with the progress of Royal honeymoon as a touchstone), their friendship grows. However, all parties must come to an end.

If you’re meant to hold those you care about lightly, I was squeezing my ‘future’ like a toddler holding Play Doh. You have so little, then, that’s actually yours, what you imagine is yours you’re constantly breaking with the ecstasy of ownership.

The themes are obvious – the contrast between rich and poor, and the development of identity. Although these themes are appropriate for Steven and Jasmine’s age and circumstances, their personal revelations and the progress of their relationship is rushed and unlikely. There’s a reason for the tight timeline that’s revealed in a dramatic ending but for the majority of the book, it’s structurally problematic.

Forrest attempts to address this issue by including numerous reflections from the adult Steven who, having realised his dream of becoming a designer, is looking back on his tumultuous friendship with Jasmine. These reflections are clunky, pretentious, and pull the reader out of 1981 London – it’s lazy story-telling.

Idolising someone is the opposite of intimacy, but I didn’t know that then.

Perhaps I’m being a grump. Expect terrific eighties references (Adam Ant stationery!) and Forrest’s writing, particularly the dialogue, is clever and engaging. She reminds us that wealth does not protect from problematic relationships, and can in fact present a whole bunch of other issues – flighty, directionless Jasmine comes across as worse off than Steven who, although lacking means, has ambition.

I knew she just expected her heart’s desire to always be available. It made up for her dad. You couldn’t have the most basic thing a girl deserves, so instead you could have the most complicated and obscure. She was genuinely surprised the charity shop had no glass Murano fish.

As characters, Jasmine and Steven seem too much at times. The more restrained development of Jasmine’s father and Steven’s mother was a highlight. Of Jasmine’s relationship with her father –

She had a lifetime supply of duty free, but to her it was irrefutable proof that he always remembered her, that she was always on his mind. Children are loyal to their parents and children are even more loyal to damaged parents.

And Steven’s mother –

I know she’d thought up a lot of inner lives, from the meticulousness with which she maintained her black hair and half-moon nails. No one ever creates a solid look – no matter the look – if they don’t harbour fantasies of escape. That’s the whole point of a signature style, To take you away from it all when you have to spend a lot of your time standing still.

We know how the Charles and Di story ended – it’s a clumsy parallel for Steven and Jasmine, however, I did linger over one of the final lines in the book –

Diana probably only did end up where she was because she was a bit directionless. She was great looking and looked beautiful in clothes – so what? She had a big heart, that’s all. She had a big heart and was a bit fucked up. That’s a powerful combination: beauty, heart, unhappiness. She gave a lot of people their direction.

3/5 Zip through it over summer.

I received my copy of Royals from the publisher, Bloomsbury, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

A star-crossed story of almost-Platonic love between a party girl and a sensitive boy in the 1980s. With flashes of fashion and glamour, this is the story of a life-changing fortnight for the future fashion designer protagonist. Quirky and lovable.

In Royals, we meet Steven, a famous fashion designer, looking back at the formative time that he believes to have been his rite of passage from youth to adulthood; from working class to the elite.

Steven is a narcissistic, whining little teenager and the fact that his father beats him does not make it any less unattractive when he constantly plays the victim card.

The plot centres around Steven’s brief relationship with Jasmine, a girl he meets in hospital after his father hit him too hard. Jasmine is a rich girl with suicidal tendencies who also has father issues. Over the space of a few days, Steven and Jasmine become intimate, bust up, get back together, share baths and travel overseas. And they hatch plans for Steven’s study and career in design.

Then there is an abrupt and not altogether convincing ending.

The novel is set in 1981 against a backdrop of the Charles and Diana wedding and their subsequent honeymoon. I think this is supposed to be some kind of metaphor but I couldn’t see it myself. It did give Steven an opportunity to make various forelock-tugging statements to Jasmine though.

Oh, and Steven spends a lot of time telling people he hasn’t decided yet whether or not he is gay. Not sure this exactly rings true for 1981 when even Marc Almond pretended to be straight.

Overall Royals was a bit mixed. There we’re some great set pieces; Somme juxtapositions of lazy inherited wealth versus hungry poverty; between Steven constantly worrying what other people thought of him and Jasmine not caring. There were some nice period details. But overall, it didn’t quite cohere into a fully formed story. I never quite believed in the world that Emma Forrest had created.

What a fantastic novel: I was gripped from the very beginning. Compulsive and compelling, well-plotted, beautifully written, and the characters so beautifully drawn. I would absolutely recommend this book to friends.

This is very good at evoking a moment in the 1980s when Diana had just married Charles. Working-class teenager Steven becomes insta-best friends with posh, wealthy Jasmine but their hedonism hides an uglier reality. Packed with cultural references and glamorous titbits, this is a lively read but it does feel a bit directionless. Jasmine is so 'on' all the time, so super-smart, super-witty that she becomes wearying to read at times. Steven, is a good foil: quieter, modest, observational, analytical - he tempers some of the high octane Jasmine-ness, even though he goes on to become a world-famous designer. With its commentary on class, money, dreams, illusions, there is more than just glitz here.

Royals is a five star joy, set during the summer of 1981. The story begins on this very day, 29th July, in 1981, when Charles and Diana married in St Paul's Cathedral. That story would end in a butterfly broken on the wheel, and so will this one.
Steven is badly beaten by his father and ends up in the same hospital ward as the charismatic and rich Jasmine. Steven is wrestling with his sexuality, which his macho father cannot cope with. Jasmine has attempted suicide, and not for the first time. She has equally complex family issues.
Together, Steven and Jasmine are perfect. Steven has a great love of fashion, and so does Jasmine. During the few months of the novel, Steven gets the push he needs, and Jasmine a friend she can rely on. It is a golden summer.

Royals is a novel about a fast, unlikely friendship, about finding someone who believes in what you can create, and about the tragedy of living too fast. Steven is eighteen, Jewish, probably gay, into fashion, and lives in the East End of London. When he is beaten by his father on the day of Charles and Diana's wedding, he ends up in hospital, where he meets Jasmine, an heiress who tried to kill herself. Drawn together by their interest in fashion and faded Hollywood stars, they begin an intense friendship, becoming inseparable despite their differences. But lurking behind Jasmine's quirkiness and frivolity lies more, and maybe her and Steven's schemes and plans aren't meant to be.

The early 80s setting of the novel is vividly depicted (though the odd Americanism does distract a little) with a distinctive style, drawing somewhat from Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty but more obsessively focused on the two central characters. It took until the end to realise that it was carefully crafted to present a very short space of time with what seems to be a meandering narrative until you see where it was going. The novel has a lot of focus on identity—on defining or not defining things, on how different identities interact—which makes it feel more like it is doing something fresh and exciting, not just another story about someone working class meeting someone very rich.

This is the kind of book where you want to immerse yourself in its aesthetic for a moment, but also remember that the point is that it isn't all as rosy as dreaming of living like that might make it seem. It feels aimed at both the millennials who enjoy the 80s vibe without having experienced it, and those who remember the names dropped throughout. Royals is a stylistic jump into a fictional summer filled with real detail.

Back around the turn of the millennium, I used to say that Forrest's Namedropper was one of only two realist novels worth a damn to come out in the nineties. The foolish bravado of a young man, obviously; with hindsight there might be as many as ten. And yet I completely failed to keep up with her subsequent work, possibly because none of it was about someone obsessed with a thinly-veiled Richey Manic. Somehow, though, the description of this one on Netgalley got me back. And it is very much a recogisable relative; our young narrator this time may be a probably-gay boy rather than a straight-ish girl, but the Elizabeth Taylor obsession is still there, as is the knack for aphoristic observations like "jumpsuits are disingenuous beasts; they pretend they're covering you when they actually reveal just about everything, like someone who says 'I don't like to gossip!'" His early life is far from original: born to a nurturing but downtrodden Jewish mother, a violent and resentful father, one of the latter's tantrums lands Steven in hospital, where he meets an impossibly rich, elegant and artfully crazy posh girl, Jasmine, fresh from her latest overdose (but the first one she really meant). So she's skinny, contradictory, smokes too much, and is fucked-up in the sort of way that seems glamorous when you're young? Yeah, perhaps a few parallels with Namedropper's object of fascination there, too. Plus the divide in social echelon, Steven's fascination not just with Jasmine but with her house and family, sets up an obvious note of Brideshead, which if you place it in the eighties (the backdrop, and the title, come from Charles and Diana's wedding and honeymoon) means you also get a reflected echo of The Line of Beauty. One exchange sums up their inspirational, doomed friendship/love/folie à deux:
"'You don't have to be up close to everything, not every single thing.'
She made a face. "Yes I do."'
And in a sense, you could say the relationship at the core of the book is the book in hologram; Jasmine brings out the fascinating core in the apparently mundane Steven, just as Forrest brings out the glittering fascination lying dormant in a story we feel we've seen too often before. Both of them do remarkable work.

Dazzling, inventive and layered, this novel is not what you expect from the title or blurb.

The book follows the meeting between Steven, aspiring teen fashion designer and a victim of parental domestic abuse, and Jasmine, a high society 'it' girl. We experience the subsequent shockwaves they encounter in their young lives with the marriage of Charles and Diana as a framing device. Imagine Simon Doonan and Tara Palmer Tompkinson having an intense friendship....

It's witty, poignant and incisive. Forrest is ingenious in evoking the early 1980's, the story is peppered with cultural references, but not to the degree to take you out of the narrative.

The writing and dialogue is clever without being showy and literary without sacrificing readability.

There are some unlikely vaguely operatic twists towards the end, but they are in keeping with the heightened period of Steven and Jasmine's lives and you are swept along nonetheless.

The release date of October is the only puzzle as it's the perfect summer read, perfect for hazy days in a city park with a glass of champagne in honour of Jasmine, and potted meat sandwiches for Steven.