Reviews with content warning for Blood - The Kingdom of Sweets

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

The Kingdom of Sweets by Erika Johansen

10 reviews

melissa_l_mcabee's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

When you hear that a book is a dark retelling of The Nutcracker your mind still does not expect a pit of corpses to appear in the story. This is absolutely a dark retelling, and was much darker than I imagined but it was enthralling. I did have to take breaks during my read through just to clear my mind of some of the imagery.

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whitneyfoster's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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sleightofdance's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

A quick and easy read despite being dark, mysterious, and challenging. All-around intriguing. Would read again.

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vj_thompson's review against another edition

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The beginning is what got me. It was hard to read and get through. The story in the beginning is straight up depressing. I wanted it to get to the plot a lot quicker.

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maregred's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

3.5

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piperclover's review

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This came out of absolutely nowhere but it absolutely hooked me. I don't read very many fantasy books because honestly I don't really enjoy fantasy but I was intrigued by this nutcracker inspired story and ended up enthralled. I love it. I can definitely see myself relestening into this audiobook or maybe even getting a physical copy because I loved it so much and I think that it's a story you could re-read multiple times and always find something new.

About halfway through I was starting to think maybe this should have been classified as horror because it was getting into super dark creepy fantasy and I think maybe it is on the edge of horror fantasy. I finished this while on a walk and I literally sat there with my mouth open on the sidewalk because the ending came out of nowhere and was so absolutely perfect for how wild the story was.

This feels like a mixture of a House of Salt and Sorrow by Erin A. Craig and An Enchantment of Ravens by Margaret Roberson but also reminded me of The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater a bit.

This is set in the late 1800s to mid 1920s throughout the entire book and it's set in a fancy estate in Russia. The main villain in this book is very similar to the main villain of a House of Salt and Sorrows in that she is dipping her finger into everyone's lives all the time and manipulating things that people see. The villain/alternate land also reminds me a little bit of the fae realm in An Enchantment of Ravens because they create a facade to show something whimsical and wonderful and in reality it's decaying and scary. But it also reminds me a little bit of The Raven Boys because nothing is as it seems and the land bends and twists and there's so much magic at play that you never really know what's actually happening.

I have never been a person that has ever enjoyed a single book where the main character is not at least 75% good but I fell hard for it in this book. Natasha is not a good person but she is a fantastic character. I was rooting for her wrongs every time even while I was gasping with my eyes bugged out of my head. Natasha is so aware of evil and wrongdoing and manipulation but she does the exact same things with very little compunction. In turn, Clara is seen as this vapid empty headed doll but she actually has depth that made for an interesting dichotomy between the two of them as twins who were seemingly raised in the same circumstances but turned out world's different.

I'm a sucker for fantasy books that somehow weave their own storyline into real life events to explain real history. Here it's done so fantastically with Russia in the early 1900s. If you are more knowledgeable about Russian history than you might catch on to this quicker than I did but it took me until the end of the book to realize that we were reading about a fantastical version of the Russian Red Terror. If you know the names of the key players of this event you'll definitely catch on quickly but I still found myself gaping at the end of the book because it was so well woven together and so interestingly told.

The ending sort of sucker-punched me and I didn't see it coming.

Maybe I should have seen it coming but I didn't when the fairy offered Natasha her role as her heir. Like I said above, I've never enjoyed characters who are morally gray or straight up evil but I was so excited at the prospect of Natasha taking the helm. Even though she doesn't, the ending is still not perfectly happy and settled. There's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of tension at the end even though technically her and Clara have resolved their issues and come together as sisters one last time. I also usually don't enjoy ambiguous or tense endings and I think I would have been upset had everything been happily fixed by the end.

The only thing I cannot think of that bothered me a little bit was that I wish we had gotten more of a explanation for how Fritz ended up the way he did. And the story and then we have mentions of him being "disturbed" and "childlike" but we never actually get an explanation for what happened and what caused him to be like this. Its obviously caused by magic and it's relating to Orlov's creations but why was he impacted so deeply and no one else was?

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kyrstin_p1989's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

An intriguing and compelling story built from the world of The Nutcracker yet vastly different from the story told in that ballet. This wasn’t what I expected but I still found myself enjoying parts of the story. My biggest issue with the story is the writing style made it less accessible than other books I tend to read. It read like a classic novel and I had to look up several words in order to understand certain passages.

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