entroarchives 's review for:

The Phoenix King by Aparna Verma

4.25

adventurous challenging dark reflective tense medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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 “You’re killing me, Yassen, and at the same time you’re the one keeping me from death”  

It’s taking me a week to figure out how I really want to talk about this book. The Phoenix King is a very well written book. I enjoy the pros. It’s not aggressively purple yet not too casual. I enjoyed the characters. They actually had a bit of life to them versus being vessels or shells. There is a sort of power system at play yet it seems very daunted. The book of the book is a very slow burn political uprising type of story, which is quite literally the opposite of what I usually enjoy. 

And yet it still one of the best books that I’ve Read so far in the year and it’s probably because at the end of the day I was left wanting to read more because I enjoy her writing style, though the story did not pull me in as I was expecting. I still found myself continuously reading which I think is a merit to her success. 

The book follows a washed up assassin a king trying to protect his kingdom and a princess trying to make her own Path to the throne. While I would usually be turned off from a slow burn book, I found myself intrigued by other things. I was very intrigued by this world. She’s built where one kingdom is built on the power of their fire bending king and their tech another kingdom is quite literally a kingdom of cyborgs almost metal people 

I was intrigued by the father daughter relationship that I got to read. I was explaining this to a friend of mine the other day that most books don’t really teach me a lesson or make me think about life, but I think because of the premise the characters and the fact that it is a South Asian inspired story I found myself much more interested in thoughts of why is the father behaving this way? Why are these decisions making? Why are these decisions? The daughter is making when I am a father what I make the same decisions with my child did my father make the same decisions with me? It’s interesting. I usually never have these thoughts, but I did this time 

I do think I’m going to pick up the next book. I don’t know when but I think I will because I wanna see where the story goes. It ended almost like I expected quite quite honestly it did end kind of how I expected it to end, which isn’t a bad thing.