It’s not every day you encounter a new format to a short ebook that challenges you to think, but The Royal Cousins does just that.
Subtitled “How Three Cousins Could Have Stopped A World War,” this is a fictional alternative look at history, “told as a series of twelve breaking news bulletins.”
In this format, it is a great “What If,” and each bulletin could be its own discussion point. This book is a jumping-off point to, as Ludlow calls it, “a timeless question: What if better leadership and moral courage had prevailed during those five critical weeks in 1914? What might we learn from that possibility in today’s fraught world?”
Personally, something that makes this alternative history plausible is community and family. As I have said on my podcast, The Palmer Files, countless times over many episodes, it’s that we lack a sense of true community anymore. To the same extent, family, which once meant the same thing to most people, now means different things to different people.
If we don’t have our own sense of community, and I’m talking about neighbors whose doors are next to yours and across the street, not avatars we collect online and we can’t agree on family, or we can’t agree on how important it is. So we have no moral or ethical basis on which this fictionalized history can be based.
That’s my takeaway. I think we need to get to know our neighbors, our real neighbors, and build community. An online community is fine, but is not the end-all be-all. We also need family to mean more. It doesn’t have to be just blood relations, either. I have brothers from other mothers, as it were. These friends have become family.
I guess you could say I yearn for some of the reasoning in The Royal Cousins to have relevance. The other part of this book, which makes it extremely fictionalized, is how Ludlow, as the author, has gone back in time to write these “news bulletins.” These aren’t sensationalized clickbait headlines.
These are the headlines as they would have been written in 1914, which also is basically how they would have been written up through the turn of the millennium. But the internet and clickbait culture, as well as news organizations that thrive on fear and clicks and sensationalism, have ruined the headline as it used to be.
So along with community and family, this book makes me mourn the rise of the clickbait headline. Oh, for simpler, and dare I say better, times…
In the meantime, pick up a copy for yourself and let me know what your takeaway is, and if you agree with me or disagree.
***Reviewer’s transparency note: I do work for The Good Government Show, where proceeds from this book go, but I was not asked nor required to review this book favourably or otherwise.
Read the Secret File of technical information and quotes from The Royal Cousins.