The Unlikely Heir, by Jax Calder

[Ulysses]

The Unlikely Heir (Unlikely Dilemmas, #1)
by Jax Calder (Goodreads Author)


The Unlikely Heir (Unlikely Dilemmas 1)
BY Jax Calder
Published by the author, 2023
5 stars

I couldn’t resist this as soon as I saw it, and it was worth reading.

The immediate connection will be made with two recent books of this genre, the hugely popular book and television movie “Red White & Royal Blue” by Casey McQuiston from 2019, and Paul Rudnick’s 2021 “Playing the Palace.” Calder, however, has given this sub-genre story a surprise twist, by making the royal prince an American.

Callum Prescott is in fact eleventh in line to the British throne. His late father was the youngest of Queen Katharine’s four children. Callum was the product of a brief marriage between a Hollywood actress and that young prince (sound familiar?). The twist is that Callum suddenly finds himself heir to the throne of the United Kingdom because of the bad behavior of the three elder royal children (sound familiar?), as well as their children (OK, this smacks of a certain former presidential family we all know well).

As far as we know in the first part of the book, Callum Prescott is straight – at least, he’s only dated women. When, however, he meets the 39-year-old Prime Minister of England, Oliver Hartwell, he discovers something about himself very similar to what the presidential son Alex Diaz discovers in “Red, White & Royal Blue.” None of this similarity troubles me at all; this is, after all, a book reflecting a moment in popular American culture that gives me great delight.

Calder’s writing is dry and witty, and she makes sure that we understand how the “ordinary” California boy, protected by his mother from most things royal, would be sympathetic to and with the lower-class London chav who fought his way into being the youngest prime minister in English history. Callum is beautiful, but he’s a goofball, and clumsy. He works in a call center and has difficulty keeping his focus on any one thing for a long time. Oliver, by contrast, is laser-focused on his career as a barrister and Labor politician. He is openly gay and is known to put his work first in his life.

There are a lot of parallels between Callum and Oliver’s story and that of Alex Diaz and Prince Henry; but there are even more differences. This is not just a story about love, but a tale of class and politics and loyalty, and a close look at what that all means in a modern-day UK. There is a certain frisson of recognition in the contrast between the octogenarian Queen Katharine, who is beloved and epically loyal to the Crown, and her children, who are entitled and corrupt.

Callum is very smart, but he is an innocent, without guile and without ambition. Oliver is brilliant, but also the opposite of innocent. However, he has the sort of personal integrity that we see in Callum. In other words, they are both opposites of the snobbish elitism and amoral mass culture in the UK. That is both their Achilles heel and their saving grace.

I suspect this book will be a hit; but had “Red White and Royal Blue” not gotten to us first, this might well have been a similar pop culture meteor. I am sad that this one won’t be made into a movie, because it would have been fabulous.