In My Best Friend’s Royal Wedding, Khara agrees, with some reluctance, to be the bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding to the Archduke of Westerwald, a tiny principality somewhere in Middle Europe. A cocktail waitress from Las Vegas, Khara finds herself daunted by the unspoken rules of etiquette that surround her, but the best man, Adam, is more than happy to be her tutor…and, if possible, to get into her pants. Trouble is, while Adam doesn’t recognise Khara, Khara remembers Adam very well – as the playboy customer who tried to proposition her at her workplace a year ago, without even bothering to learn her name first.

This is not, at first glance, a setup that is going to appeal to me. Adam is, absolutely, unquestionably, an entitled douche (the douche part is his phrasing, the entitled is mine – he’s nowhere near self-aware enough for that to occur to him). This is not to say that he is cruel or even unkind; he just has a lot of money and a lot of entitlement and absolutely no interest in doing anything that might involve effort or commitment on his part. He’s selfish and lazy, and accustomed to using his money and his charm to get what he wants, when he wants it. At the start of the book, he is faced with the choice of becoming the heir to his uncle’s throne, and he spends a large part of the book pretending to consider this without actually doing so, because he reckons it would be too much like hard work. I did not take to him.

And yet… look, there’s some pretty magical writing somewhere in here, because somehow I kept getting charmed by Adam, completely against my will. Then he would do something douchey again, and I would get annoyed again, but I actually had no trouble seeing how Khara, who has a very strong bullshit detector, let herself be charmed by him in spite of everything. After all, he is absolutely capable of being kind and friendly and helpful if it suits him, and since he was trying to seduce Khara, it suited him to be very kind and friendly and helpful indeed.

I mean, I’m pretty sure Adam exists in the real world and operates precisely like that. I’m less convinced that he’s a hero, however.

Khara, for her part, has her head screwed on straight. She’s grown up as the daughter of a single mother who was always chasing the next star over the horizon, and her plan is to get her degree in finance, find herself a nice, secure office job, and maybe down the line a nice, secure husband as well. She doesn’t believe in love – lust, absolutely, but love not at all – and she has absolutely no time for an entitled jerk who doesn’t even remember propositioning her. The fact that she is extremely attracted to him on a physical level is not going to influence her – she knows better than to fall into bed with a man who ‘doesn’t do repeats’.

She is also deep in fish out of water territory at her friend’s wedding, and very practical, so if Adam’s attraction to her means that he will provide her with the tutoring she needs, she’s going to take it. I may have had no time at all for Adam, but Khara? Rocked my socks.

So how do you get from that starting point to a happy ending? Well, Adam is going to have to be Changed By Love, of course, and that, to my mind, is the weakness of the book. As he falls for Khara, he also starts to realise how little respect she has for him, and that’s uncomfortable. And Adam doesn’t like to feel uncomfortable. He’s also smart enough to realise that if he wants Khara’s respect, he will have to do something to earn it. So he starts to think that maybe he should actually get serious about figuring out whether this heir-to-the-throne job would be something he could do properly, and surprise! It turns out to be something he is quite good at and enjoys. Of course, it still takes him most of the book to commit to this, or indeed to anything else.

I mean, you don’t need me to tell you how problematic the Changed By Love narrative is. To be fair, in this instance, the change is a little more internally motivated, and Khara has no idea that she has any part in his decisions to try to be slightly more responsible. But it still makes me uncomfortable. What happens if it all gets too hard later? Or if he loses interest in Khara? He is thirty and has literally never been in love or had a relationship before. Why should we trust this one to last? Can the Magical Hoo-Haa transform the Peen of Irresponsibility into the Tumescent Luminescence of True Love?

Yeah, sorry, I got carried away there.

And yet, this story just kept on sucking me back in. I liked Adam and Khara bantering together, and I absolutely adored all the etiquette lessons and mentoring, from the Art of Small Talk to the sensual dance lessons (you’ll be glad to know that as long as Khara is looking into Adam’s eyes, she dances superbly – it’s that sort of book). I enjoyed Khara’s torturing Adam by dragging him around art galleries, and I liked his encouraging her by dropping hints about the cutlery on the way into formal dinners. I also liked the emphasis on how much work is involved in being part of a royal family or entourage, from tips on when you should wash your hair if you plan to wear a tiara, to knowing that you need to eat a proper meal before any banquet because the food is mostly there as an excuse for the conversations and will not be filling.

Another thing I liked was how much Khara loved Adam’s country, Erdély – there was a tiny echo of Eliza Bennett first falling in love with Darcy when she saw Pemberly there, I think.

My Best Friend’s Royal Wedding also had an uncanny knack of evoking emotion and memory. In particular, it really brought back every single emotion I felt when I flew up to Darwin to help my own best friend get married several years ago. I have no idea how this was, but again, there was some writing magic going on here.

This is such a tricky book to grade. I simultaneously really enjoyed reading it and also found the hero thoroughly annoying and entitled. He didn’t really grow up until the very end of the book, and that was too late for me. And yet…the story had an undeniable ability to pluck at my emotions. I want to read the other books in the series. I want the backstories of all the other characters (who clearly have had books of their own), and I want more of the fun, frivolous humour, and strange attention to the details of etiquette (please, more details of etiquette!).

I honestly don’t know where to go with this. D is for a Douchebag Hero, yes, and C is for the Cliché of Transforming Love, but on the other hand, A is for Arcane Writing Magic that made the reading experience feel so much more than the sum of its (very annoying) parts. There really is a spark of brilliance there that kept me reading and invested despite feeling very strongly that the hero was an entitled man-child who needed to grow the hell up. (I mean, yes, he had some reasons for his commitment-phobia, but we find out about them so very late in the book that it was hard to retrospectively excuse him.)

My Best Friend’s Royal Wedding is far from perfect, but for all its flaws, there was something there that got its hooks into me, and that’s worth… something.

I think I’m going to land on a B minus – B for that stroke of Brilliance, and Minus for the hero.

I’ll be really interested to see what Sommer does next.