The Royal Holiday by Jasmine Guillory had me smiling from page one and kept me delighted all the way through. My joy was so palpable that I had coworkers asking me during my lunch break what I was reading because I don’t usually spend my lunch so lovingly enraptured by my cell phone.

An extremely charming romance centered around two Black adults in their 50s who are thrown together during Christmas, The Royal Holiday is an easy book to jump into, even without having read other books in the series. All I had known was that the book was loosely inspired by a news story about Queen Elizabeth inviting the mother of Duchess Meghan to spend Christmas with the royals (which obviously launched a thousand squee ships of joy), and I didn’t feel lost at all inside the narrative despite not knowing the back stories of the other characters.

My knowledge of Duchess Meghan and her mom is fairly limited, so it was pretty easy to forget the fact that this book is inspired by a real person. And this could just be my own ignorance speaking (as I have not been particularly interested in asking the internet about more specifics), but it seems like the similarities between reality and fiction stop at the point where both have a middle-aged Black woman from California with some connection to the British royal family. Ultimately, forgetting about reality and getting settled into the narrative was easy to do because the characters and the story were so engrossing.

Vivian Forest is the mother of a woman hired as the stylist to a Duchess for the Christmas holidays. Malcolm Hudson (initially nicknamed Hot Chocolate by Vivian!) is the private secretary to the Queen. They are at the same estate because the royal family is spending Christmas together and Malcolm, as part of his service to the Queen, must stay close because Parliament is causing trouble and he needs to keep her informed.

Vivian and Malcolm find each other very quickly at the beginning of Vivian’s trip and over a short number of days they are not hesitant to jump into a holiday romance. They are single adults in their 50s with very little situational or internal drama attached to their existence (no one is on the run, no meddling exes, no deep dark secrets, no struggle with some inexorable destiny prophesied long ago), so there is no shame and no denial over the attraction they feel towards each other. Like Vivian and Malcolm, this romance doesn’t shy away from the sexy bits. While there is on-the-page sex, the characters take a reasonable amount of time to get there in their relationship, so though the characters are immediately attracted to each other there are no real instalust issues in this story. It’s all very delightful and very low conflict. And generally hilarious.

Vivian’s got jokes:

No matter what, she’d [Vivian] better go downstairs showered, with her hair in place, and with a bra on. There might be a prince in the kitchen, for God’s sake.

And some unrepentant man-ogling:

Vivian couldn’t decide what appealed to her more, hot coffee and fresh scones, or that man in the corner who looked like a tall mug of hot chocolate.

Why choose?

But also, Malcolm and Vivian together are a hoot:

“There’s nothing to be terrified about,”[Malcolm] said. “The horses will be lovely to you, I promise, and so will the staff.”

Would she be open to getting on a horse? Would the stable master give her the chance? For some reason, he was very much hoping she’d be able to have this opportunity.

[Vivian] raised an eyebrow at him.

“Oh, you can speak for horses now?”

He nodded seriously.

“The Queen’s horses are monarchists; they would never dare to mistreat a guest of the royal family.”

They looked at each other and laughed.

The only major conflict is at the end of the time they have together. Since Vivian lives in Oakland, California, and Malcolm’s job serving the Queen obviously means he has to stick close to where she is, they decide that neither wants to do a long-distance relationship.

There were two big things that I loved about this story. One moment was at the wooing and flirting stage where the main characters wrote notes to each other and, because they are on a royal estate, they had footmen delivering their cute little letters back and forth to each other. Malcolm knows that Vivian, who pokes gentle fun at the staid Englishness of many of the traditions she encounters, would find communication via footmen-delivered notes on official stationary to be hilarious and all he wants to do is delight her.

Both characters acknowledge that they are in a space that makes them more aware of their Blackness and, in particular, the former British empire’s own historical relationship to race and oppression. But, they also refuse to bound by that history. It was a fun surprise to see hints of this double consciousness. Upon meeting Malcolm, Vivian almost immediately asks him if he is the first Black man to serve the Queen as the private secretary and Vivian perpetually worries that the estate staff will resent having to serve someone like her, a Black (and American) woman in her 50s. They still manage to gleefully engage in a particular piece of a traditional English courtship, both aware of the anachronistic nature of their flirting, but also aware of how no part of their current circumstances would have been possible in the time period of that practice.

I love historical romance novels despite the fact that the story often fails to acknowledge that it is operating within a time period where various kinds of people were being exploited, often (but not exclusively) through slavery, and that many of the main characters are able to live very comfortable lives through their conscious and unconscious participation in very violent systems of oppression. And so, I sometimes engage in a fair bit of mental gymnastics where I tell myself that perhaps the book is set in the multiverse, in another universe where all the characters aren’t overwhelmingly White and did not get their wealth through the exploitation of labor and conquering of people of color. Which would then excuse the characters for never discussing slavery. It would totally makes sense for there to be no discussion of slavery in a universe that has no slavery! So in some ways, by engaging in this multiverse overlay of historical romances I’m doing the genre a kindness, meeting it where it is and reframing it in my own headcanon so that it is something more complex and reflective of a world I’m looking for, but it is extra work I do.

What Royal Holiday gave me was an opportunity to not have to bend over backwards. The story lets two Black people engage in silly historical romantic tropes and simultaneously acknowledge why their Blackness means they would have never been able to engage in such practices in the past while also refusing to have that be a reason to limit the choices they are making in the present.

The other thing I loved about these characters is that they are both Black people who are extraordinarily good at their jobs and who have to carry not only the hefty responsibilities of their actual positions, but also know that they represent the hopes and dreams–some denied, some deferred–of the people who came before them and those who follow in their footsteps. Both struggle with the psychological impacts of shouldering that responsibility alone and are only beginning to acknowledge that they have other choices besides choosing the greater good over creating a life for themselves that makes them happy.

But, this book does not dwell on the ways Vivian and Malcolm are unhappy; it only firmly roots the story in the realities of what it means to be a Black person and never lets those realities be a barrier to falling in love. In the end, this story is overwhelmingly about saying yes to good things put directly in your path. If all you want to do is wrap yourself up in a Christmas love story with two adults just admirably adulting all the way through the book, I say grab a Christmas sweater and a hot chocolate, and get ready to have a stranger ask you why you look so happy reading the book you have in your hand!