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A review by eemms
The Imposter Prince by Wendy Rathbone
1.0
I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review
Honestly: I did not like this book!
I'm just going to go ahead and blanket warning for spoilers here. cw: discussion of mental health issues in a negative light. Also cw: mentions of slavery/slave kink and Captive Prince
So I started this ARC and right away I'm like yes, this is id-y and kinky, I can get into this. Dare (the MC) is the plaything of Darius (the prince). He's made to act as human furniture (and called Footstool) as well as suck Darius off and generally put up with anything the prince wants to dole out. Here we go, I thought, we'll have some slave kink, some humiliation kink, maybe it's going to wind up incest-y but I think I can deal with that (It's never explicit in the book but I'm like 98% sure they're half-brothers). I *loved* the Captive Prince and I thought it was going that direction.
Then 20% into the book. And I was like. That's it??? No dirtywrong sex, no falling in love with your cruel tormentor, none of that? Nope! All of a sudden we're in an 80s fantasy novel, and then honestly I found the rest really boring.
Would I have liked this more if it hadn't felt like such a bait and switch? Probably. But the pacing is pretty choppy, the prose wasn't my style, and the main romance between Dare and the foreign prince Malory wasn't at all compelling to me. Most of it seemed glossed over in a "over many days they fell in love" off page way.
So the romance wasn't there for me, and everything that was there...I didn't like. There was a lot of moping and introspection. There were several chapters devoted to a gross, sadistic, philosophical dungeon master. I'm not sure what the intended effect was but it wasn't one I liked.
Finally, and I can't let this go as it got worse and worse over the course of the book, there was a lot of casting mental illness in a really negative light. At one point "Schizoid" is flung out as an insult, which first of all, was like having Lord of the Rings elves use "r*t*rd" as an insult. Threw me RIGHT out of the fantasy setting, let me tell you. But I thought, maybe it's a one off mistake. Unfortunately not. Prince Darius (the dead one) was anxious and increasingly agoraphobic. He was also cruel and volatile. In the second half of the book these two traits are increasingly conflated as Dare reminisces about how "crazy" Darius was. As someone who is anxious and not a sociopath, I disliked this.
I wouldn't have finished this book if I didn't have the 2nd in the series (also an ARC) that I promised myself I would at least start.
I read romance novels for either pants feels, or heart feels, or ideally both. This provided neither.
Honestly: I did not like this book!
I'm just going to go ahead and blanket warning for spoilers here. cw: discussion of mental health issues in a negative light. Also cw: mentions of slavery/slave kink and Captive Prince
So I started this ARC and right away I'm like yes, this is id-y and kinky, I can get into this. Dare (the MC) is the plaything of Darius (the prince). He's made to act as human furniture (and called Footstool) as well as suck Darius off and generally put up with anything the prince wants to dole out. Here we go, I thought, we'll have some slave kink, some humiliation kink, maybe it's going to wind up incest-y but I think I can deal with that (It's never explicit in the book but I'm like 98% sure they're half-brothers). I *loved* the Captive Prince and I thought it was going that direction.
Then 20% into the book
Spoiler
prince Darius dies, just straight up spike through the chest diesWould I have liked this more if it hadn't felt like such a bait and switch? Probably. But the pacing is pretty choppy, the prose wasn't my style, and the main romance between Dare and the foreign prince Malory wasn't at all compelling to me. Most of it seemed glossed over in a "over many days they fell in love" off page way.
So the romance wasn't there for me, and everything that was there...I didn't like. There was a lot of moping and introspection. There were several chapters devoted to a gross, sadistic, philosophical dungeon master. I'm not sure what the intended effect was but it wasn't one I liked.
Finally, and I can't let this go as it got worse and worse over the course of the book, there was a lot of casting mental illness in a really negative light. At one point "Schizoid" is flung out as an insult, which first of all, was like having Lord of the Rings elves use "r*t*rd" as an insult. Threw me RIGHT out of the fantasy setting, let me tell you. But I thought, maybe it's a one off mistake. Unfortunately not. Prince Darius (the dead one) was anxious and increasingly agoraphobic. He was also cruel and volatile. In the second half of the book these two traits are increasingly conflated as Dare reminisces about how "crazy" Darius was. As someone who is anxious and not a sociopath, I disliked this.
I wouldn't have finished this book if I didn't have the 2nd in the series (also an ARC) that I promised myself I would at least start.
I read romance novels for either pants feels, or heart feels, or ideally both. This provided neither.