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A review by esotericelixir
Castle of Lies by Kiersi Burkhart
1.0
Oh man. This book me a long time to get through because I’d read a few pages and then just get tired of it and put it to the side, but I felt the call in me tonight to just power through it and see how much I could get done in one sitting. Turns out, it didn’t actually take too long to read and I’m not entirely certain that’s a good thing.
There are many TW’s in this book, which have been mentioned before in other reviews so instead of repeating them I implore you to check out this review which has everything I could think of saying: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2643400217
The premise of the book sounded super interesting. Who doesn’t want to read about ancient magic, elves, royal political schemes. Unfortunately it just wasn’t delivered and didn’t live up to the imaginary hype I had in my brain when I requested this book on netgalley.
The characters just seemed so one dimensional that I couldn’t connect with them and we kept switching between them in a manner that wasn’t conducive to having a strong narrative from any POV. The mannerisms of the characters also seemed off, there’s just something icky and off putting, to me, about a YA using the term “daddy” to refer to a father. There was also the fact of ... incest. Yeah. I understand this is a fantasy novel, but I truly can’t be on board with incest being a main LI. It’s not even like they had the characters not know they were related (which while still ew, is less ew than what happened), the two characters grew up together and still were happy to knock boots and ... yeah.
Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.
There are many TW’s in this book, which have been mentioned before in other reviews so instead of repeating them I implore you to check out this review which has everything I could think of saying: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2643400217
The premise of the book sounded super interesting. Who doesn’t want to read about ancient magic, elves, royal political schemes. Unfortunately it just wasn’t delivered and didn’t live up to the imaginary hype I had in my brain when I requested this book on netgalley.
The characters just seemed so one dimensional that I couldn’t connect with them and we kept switching between them in a manner that wasn’t conducive to having a strong narrative from any POV. The mannerisms of the characters also seemed off, there’s just something icky and off putting, to me, about a YA using the term “daddy” to refer to a father. There was also the fact of ... incest. Yeah. I understand this is a fantasy novel, but I truly can’t be on board with incest being a main LI. It’s not even like they had the characters not know they were related (which while still ew, is less ew than what happened), the two characters grew up together and still were happy to knock boots and ... yeah.
Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.