To Kill a Kingdom

Book Title: To Kill a Kingdom

Author: Alexandra Christo

Date Started: May 1st 2018

Date Completed: May 7th 2018

Genres: Adventure, Fantasy, Romance

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Two Stars

Final Rating: Two stars

Review:

◆ Thanks to NetGalley for this ebook for review ◆

Oh boy, oh boy, am I salty about this one. To Kill a Kingdom has a fantastic concept - and I'm serious about that. The Little Mermaid but the mermaid is a murderer and the prince is a seafaring siren hunter. It sounds amazing. And in practice, it's -almost - amazing. So you have to understand me when I say that I am so very very upset this was written the way it is. Because I nearly put it down about five or six times before completely giving up, and I still only made it 37% of the way through.

This isn't dark, it's just abusive. There's no weight to it, no emotional stakes. Just pulled strings for the sake of being edgy, and I think it's dangerous because these characters are going through what, in theory, are really horrific and terrible things. But the emotional backlash is being so glossed over that it's almost romanticsed and I don't think that's at all fair. Maybe if it wasn't marketed as dark and didn't end up going on to be a romance (which, let's be honest, was obvious from the second you heard she kills princes, I mean there isn't even any convincing attempt to suggest otherwise). Dark is when bad things happen and they feed into the story because a person can't possible go through it without it affecting their story. This felt like it was trying to get on the YA bestsellers list by being edgy.

I think that Elian was also of more interest to the author than Lira was. I know she's trying to push a strong female protagonist, but when your male lead has a more interesting story - which you devote about twice as many speaking lines, chapter perspectives, active decisions to and more - you're shooting the woman in the foot. You can still have strong female characters without them being the protagonists, and that's okay if that's the story that needs to be told. But so much of what I read in this book was a specific story that didn't make logical sense as to what the characters believed and how they had acted by until that point. I couldn't engage with the plot because all that I could think was 'this doesn't make sense', 'how does that work?', 'why are they doing that?'

Going back to the unconvincing darkness to further this, I struggled with this book because the people weren't real enough to be believable. An example being that Lira, our protagonist, hates her one-dimensional-force-of-upmost evil mother, but will do whatever she says. Despite thinking of herself as a rebel? And yet says she's fearsome, but doesn't react like a person scared of another person at all. Why? Because she's protecting her friend? Having someone to defend doesn't evaporate your fear, it gives you a reason to push through it. I didn't feel like Lira was having to push through anything. She was just bad-mouthed and volatile to the whims of whatever the plot needed. (There was a moment where I thought she was going to have her voice taken away, like in the original fairytale - I mean they literally say she'll be 'without her voice' - and that we might get a chance for her to actually have to act and grow as a person. But no, we can't possibly have our spunky heroine without the ability to drone on annoyingly for no purpose than her own arrogance.)

Maybe I'm overreacting. I feel like every point I have to make about this isn't dramatic enough for me to rate it as lowly as I have. But at the same time, I just don't feel like I can give it any higher. I know some people are enjoying it, and I'm happy for them, but I just cannot stomach lazy, underdeveloped, contradictory and consequently problematic writing.