Reviews - The Veiled Kingdom

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3.14k reviews for:

The Veiled Kingdom

Holly Renee

3.71 AVERAGE

maccloud's review against another edition

4.5

adventurous dark tense fast-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: No

cierralovesliterature's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 9%

not really intrigued. i should also be focusing on my physical tbr anyway. send help x

jessleigh0918's review against another edition

4.0

Book 1 I liked a lot honestly. I thought the hidden kingdom was cool, and I liked that the FMC was tough without being a good fighter or a particularly sassy smart mouth. She was just kind of quietly strong and good at keeping her mouth shut and not revealing too much. A lot of the time, these books will either turn the FMC into some crazy fighter (

we did get the training trope, but she never got particularly good

) or she'll have crazy secret powers (

this is kind of accurate here, but only kind of

), so it was nice that she

remained kind of normal.

I also feel like these FMC are always bitter/mean/sarcastic and that back and forth with the equally rude MMC is considered sexy banter/foreplay. Again, not the case here. She's not particularly sassy.

Main issues were that the world building made no sense. Are these humans? Fae? (There were zero mentions of gently pointed ears so I'm going with human because you can't have a fae book without that phrase.) And what exactly is their magic?

On the romance side, I have no idea why Nyra had any interest in Dacre, since all he did was treat her like shit in public and nonstop tell her he wanted to bang her in private. But it's kind of implied that she is turned on by some humiliation/degradation so I guess that's why? Kind of hard to believe considering she's a virgin who has literally been locked in a castle tower and has never experienced another human, much less a boy. Anyway, I thought the spicy scenes were pretty good, personally. But you have to go into it knowing that he's going to say toxic humiliating things to and about her and she is going to like it. The worse he is, the more turned on she seems to be.

The spice being good cut off before that end scene though. His knowledge of who she is, along with his knowledge that she's a virgin makes this feel like SA to me. And his timing of the reveal to coincide with her coming is diabolical.