The cake scene. If you have read Red, White & Royal Blue, those three words are enough. A royal wedding, a very expensive dessert, and two people who have spent years pretending to loathe each other are suddenly sprawled on the floor, and the whole book tilts on its axis.
Casey McQuiston’s 2019 debut follows Alex Claremont-Diaz, the First Son of the United States, and Prince Henry of England, whose public feud turns into a staged friendship and then into something much harder to manage. It is funny, political in the gentlest way, and sincerely moved by the idea that two people can be changed by being truly known.
If you finished it and felt the particular emptiness of a book that was too short, this list is for you. Each pick below is matched to something Red, White & Royal Blue did well: the banter, the rivalry, the secret, the swoon. A quick note for your TBR: heat levels vary, and I have flagged the spicier ones.
Before the readalikes, it helps to name what you are actually chasing. Most readers who love this book are responding to a handful of ingredients.
Rivals to lovers with real history. Alex and Henry do not simply meet and bicker. They have a long, documented enmity, and the thaw feels earned because it is slow.
A secret that raises the stakes. Their relationship has to stay hidden because one of them is the son of a president in an election year and the other is a prince. Every stolen text and midnight email carries weight.
Epistolary charm. The emails between Alex and Henry are some of the best love letters in contemporary romance. Books that give you intimacy through correspondence, texting, or confession hit the same nerve.
Joy. This matters more than people admit. The book is not afraid of happiness, and it does not punish its characters for wanting it.
Keep those four in mind and the recommendations below will make sense.
Matches: the rivalry, the long enmity, the slow thaw.
Simon Snow is the Chosen One, the most powerful magician of his generation, and he is not very good at being him. His roommate at the Watford School of Magicks is Baz Pitch, a vampire, an aristocrat, and Simon’s sworn enemy. Over eight years of school they have tried to ruin each other, and in their final year something shifts.
Rowell’s 2015 novel began as fan fiction within her earlier book Fangirl, and it carries the affectionate, subversive energy of the best chosen-one parodies. Baz and Simon’s dynamic is the closest thing in YA fantasy to Alex and Henry’s: two boys who have been circling each other for so long that the moment the circling stops, everything breaks open.
If you want your enemies to lovers with a magic school and a villain called the Insidious Humdrum, start here.
Matches: the banter, the fake-dating stakes, the British humor.
Luc O’Donnell is the son of two rock legends and a magnet for tabloid scandal. After one particularly bad headline, he needs to rebuild his reputation, and fast. Enter Oliver Blackwood, a serious, principled barrister who agrees to be his fake boyfriend for a series of charity events.
Alexis Hall’s 2020 novel is laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also surprisingly tender about what it costs to be seen. Luc’s self-deprecating narration will remind you of Alex’s, and the contrast between his chaos and Oliver’s reserve gives the romance a lovely friction. The sequel, Husband Material, arrived in 2021 if you want more.
This is a good choice if the Britain-meets-America comedy was your favorite part.
Matches: the author’s voice, the queer joy, the found family.
August Landry is a cynical twenty-three-year-old who moves to New York and takes a job at a pancake diner. On the Q train, she meets Jane Su, a punk-rock girl in a leather jacket who looks like she stepped out of 1977, and who, it turns out, is stuck on the subway line, displaced from her own time.
McQuiston’s 2021 follow-up is a very different book from Red, White & Royal Blue, but it has the same generosity. The ensemble of roommates and coworkers feels like a chosen family you want to join, and the central romance has the same ache of two people who should not be able to find each other. If you loved the author’s warmth, this is the obvious next read.
Matches: the public-versus-private tension, the emotional honesty.
Dev Deshpande is a producer on Ever After, a Bachelor-style reality show. He believes in love so completely that he has built a career helping others find it, even after his own heart was broken. This season’s lead is Charlie Winshaw, a tech wunderkind whose anxiety and avoidance make him a camera-shy disaster.
Cochrun’s 2021 debut turns a reality-TV setting into a gentle, honest romance. Like Alex and Henry, Dev and Charlie have a relationship that plays out under public scrutiny, and the novel treats mental health with unusual care. It is also very funny. If you wanted a book that stays both sweet and smart, this is it.
Matches: the royal-adjacent setting, the pining, the adventure.
It is 1720, and Henry “Monty” Montague is about to embark on a grand tour of Europe, which he plans to spend drinking, gambling, and avoiding his future. His best friend Percy, who happens to be the person Monty is quietly in love with, is traveling with him. Naturally, things go wrong.
Lee’s 2017 historical romp has the charm of a caper and the ache of a love that cannot be spoken. Where Red, White & Royal Blue sets its pining against modern politics, this one sets it against pirates, highwaymen, and an alchemical mystery. Monty’s wit is the same family as Alex’s. A companion novel centered on his sister, The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, followed in 2018.
Matches: the royal setting, the romcom pacing, the enemies-to-lovers beat.
Millie Quint is a Texan who gets herself accepted to a prestigious Scottish boarding school after a rough year at home. Her roommate turns out to be Flora, a princess, and a very prickly one. The two spend most of the book at war before the war becomes something else entirely.
Hawkins, who also wrote the royal romcom Prince Charming, treats the premise with a comic touch and a real appreciation for how strange it is to have your private feelings tracked by the public. If the royal in Royal Blue was what hooked you, this sapphic romance is the one to pick up.
Matches: the slow melt, the small-town warmth, the sapphic sweetness.
Delilah Green is a photographer who left her hometown of Bright Falls behind and has no plans to return. Then her estranged stepsister Astrid asks her to shoot her wedding photographs, and she reluctantly goes. There she meets Claire Sutherland, a single mother and Astrid’s best friend, who is far more complicated than she first appears.
Blake’s 2022 novel is the first in the Bright Falls series. It is built on the same pleasures that made Alex and Henry so satisfying: the tension of two people who have every reason to avoid each other, and the quiet, then loud, recognition that they will not. The found-family warmth is a bonus.
Matches: the emotional depth, the friendship that becomes love.
Set in El Paso in 1987, Sáenz’s 2012 novel follows Aristotle, a quiet and angry fifteen-year-old, and Dante, an open and intellectual boy he meets at a swimming pool one summer. The two become friends, then something deeper, though it takes Ari a long time to understand it.
This one is quieter than Red, White & Royal Blue, and it hurts in a different way. But it understands what McQuiston understands: that falling in love can feel like finally being able to breathe. Keep tissues nearby. It is lyrical and profound, and it is regularly named as a favorite by people who came to it through BookTok.
Matches: the humor, the supernatural twist, the heart.
Yadriel is a trans boy from a family of brujx who wants nothing more than to prove his gender and his magic to his community. To do that, he summons a ghost, but instead of his murdered cousin he accidentally raises Julian Díaz, a charismatic, impossible-to-ignore classmate who refuses to move on.
Thomas’s 2020 debut is lively and often hilarious, with a strong sense of community and family, and with a romance that builds from reluctant partnership to something much bigger. If you liked the combination of comic pacing and honest emotional stakes in Red, White & Royal Blue, this one balances them well.
Matches: the secret relationship, the high-profile rivals, and the heat.
This is the spicy pick. Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov are two of the best hockey players in the world, and rivals on opposite sides of the ice. For years they have been meeting in secret, a relationship built on fierce competition and a hunger that neither can explain to anyone.
Reid’s 2019 book is the second in her Game Changers series and is explicit, so check your comfort level before you start. It shares the central engine of Red, White & Royal Blue, the intimacy between two people who are supposed to be on opposite sides, and it earned a new wave of readers after its screen adaptation. If you want the secret-relationship tension turned up to full heat, this is the one.
With ten options, it helps to match the book to the thing you miss most.
The thing these books share is not a single trope but a temperament. They are hopeful. They let their characters be funny and frightened and brave in the same chapter, and they trust the reader to want a happy ending without apologizing for it.
If you keep a reading log, this is also a good moment to mark which of these made you laugh and which made you cry, because the two lists tend to be different, and knowing the difference is the surest way to find your next favorite.
Keep your TBR in order, log every readalike, and remember which book gave you the biggest swoon with Bookdot.
