Take a photo of a barcode or cover
emmareadstoomuch 's review for:
To Kill a Kingdom
by Alexandra Christo
I am proposing a new law: Books that are not good should not be allowed to have really good opening lines. Because then I open them in Barnes & Noble and am like “wow I should buy this” and then I do (except not immediately because I don’t have B&N levels of money honey) and then I’m disappointed and I hate it and it’s honestly bad for all of us.
This law is for the good of the people, you know?
https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2018/11/15/universally-loved-books-i-hate-more-unpopular-opinions/
LISTEN TO THIS OPENING LINE YOU GUYS. And by listen to I of course mean read. But like, come on: “I have a heart for every year I’ve been alive.”
Tell me that doesn’t seem like the rest of the hundreds of pages that follow it should be good!! Tell me! You’d be wrong. It seems like they should be good and yet they aren’t and that is an injustice so massive I will dedicate the rest of my life to getting legislation on the books that will prevent it from ever happening again.
Hahahaha. “Legislation on the books.” Get it? Like that’s what you say about passing legislation successfully, but also it would be legislation on books? God I’m funny.
But let’s talk synopsis. To Kill a Kingdom is (allegedly) a high fantasy about this gal Lira. Lira’s a siren - the princess of the sirens. Sirens RIP the HEARTS out of dudes!! Pretty rad stuff, violent af, we love it. Lira is especially badass, and she ONLY steals the hearts of princes. F*ck the system, girl, I get it. Take down the patriarchy/our capitalist oppressors/etc etc. I’m still into it.
Here’s where you lose me.
This is a Little Mermaid retelling (okay actually still rad) in which Lira is given human legs because she takes a heart without it being her birthday (she can only take a heart for every year yadda yadda) and her mom (the queen, a Very Bad Lady) says oh you think you’re so tough??? Okay. Get me the heart of an Extra Special Prince - the Siren Killer.
Dun dun dun!
This might sound good, unless you’re like me and cynical and well-versed in YA and you know what that actually means. Because if you guessed “Lira will now participate in a not-so-slow burn but absolutely teeming with sh*tty banter romance with the Siren Killer himself, Elian,” you’re today’s lucky winner! Congratulations. Your prize is universal suffering.
This should have been violence and revenge and piracy and maybe some cool monarchical world-building if there’s time. Instead, it was boring and romance and boring and terrible banter and boring and confusing info dumps and boring and weird flat writing and oh my god you guys this book was so f*cking BORING!!!
I hated this book!!! It’s been so long since I’ve read garbage YA fantasy that I almost forgot why I don’t read YA fantasy like ever!!! Contemporaries can be worse than fantasy could ever be but they are never so horrible to read.
Like, let’s talk about the basic requirements of high fantasy that this book does not even BEGIN to satisfy. For one, language??? It’s not that hard to not use slang!! And like I’m SO sorry but when you’re pretending you’re writing high fantasy while using the word “okay” it doesn’t work for me again I’m SO sorry.
And if you’re going to write a standalone about a world with one hundred separate island kingdoms and do this bad of a job worldbuilding, honestly please at least give me a map so I can gaze lovingly at it and pretend to enjoy it. This world could have been so cool but we get basically zero geographical or historical or general information, just weird random details about specific island-nations, and I’m quite seriously sick of it!!!
I hated the romance. It was mostly banter that was just uniquely terrible, really just a whole new level of unfunny and bad but with characters being like “Wow...she is very funny...I quite like her...ha ha dare I say she is one of the gang...lol you may have met your match, dear sir...sounds like someone else I know...ha ha ha, I kid, oh yes, we have fun, lmao.”
Also as established, the language is like one step above using text abbreviations anyway.
Anyway once we get past the banter stage of the romance, we jump straight into “icky gross touchy feely lovey dovey I hate it get it away from me.” And then betrayal, and then more of that again! It’s painful in a hundred different ways and it never gets better.
Part of this is because THE CHARACTERS ARE AWFUL!!! Lira is nowhere near the cool violent siren I EXPECTED and DESERVED. She’s just mean and prissy and thinks she’s really funny and badass but god she is not at all. A lot like another red-haired fishy nemesis of mine.
And Elian is just...boring. The siren song of the YA male love interest. A real poor little rich boy type situation. SO SORRY YOU MIGHT HAVE TO RULE OVER AN ISLAND MADE OF GOLD, ASSHOLE. WE WEEP FOR YOUR SUFFERING, WE REALLY DO.
Speaking of boring, this sh*t had absolutely no right to be and yet here we are. This is the most boring book in the history of ever. I don’t get it! The world-building was god awful, half the characters were flat, there was no setup or explanation or exposition of any kind, and yet NOTHING HAPPENS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE BOOK. I got halfway through and thought I was only a fraction of the way in! Nope, just bad writing!
How do you pitch a violent siren/pirate high fantasy YA retelling of the Little Mermaid and somehow make it boring? That’s almost so awful it turns in on itself and becomes impressive.
Almost.
Plus this wasn’t violence-y anyway. It was just “““character development.””” Elian spends half the book crying about how it’s so mean of him to kill sirens (they’re only killing his people for no reason, guys!) and Lira spends half the book thinking about how it’s too mean of her to kill someone assexy great as Elian even though she should be planning that grand revenge plot on her mom she swears is happening and will def involve murder for sure.
We get no violence. We get pondering and crying and more pondering and the ultimate condemnation of violence and it is a hundred thousand million times worse than if this were a straightforward Little Mermaid retelling with no violence at all.
Bottom line: Boring. Bad characters. Bad romance. Bad world-building. Weird bad writing. Bad, inaccurate synopsis. Boring boring boring, bad bad bad.
------------------------
update
This review was discussed on the Hey Good Bookin' podcast! I have never felt cooler.
------------------------
pre-review
Really starting to think you guys all just pretended this book was good and got me all excited to read it as some sort of elaborate, cruel prank.
IT WAS BAD AND NOW I'M DISAPPOINTED.
review to come once I recover from this (read: NEVER. I'LL NEVER GET OVER IT)
------------------------
currently-reading updates
I hadn't picked up this book in a couple days and assumed I was like 1/4 of the way into it, since nothing has really happened yet.
NOPE.
I'M MORE THAN HALFWAY DONE.
WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.
This law is for the good of the people, you know?
https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2018/11/15/universally-loved-books-i-hate-more-unpopular-opinions/
LISTEN TO THIS OPENING LINE YOU GUYS. And by listen to I of course mean read. But like, come on: “I have a heart for every year I’ve been alive.”
Tell me that doesn’t seem like the rest of the hundreds of pages that follow it should be good!! Tell me! You’d be wrong. It seems like they should be good and yet they aren’t and that is an injustice so massive I will dedicate the rest of my life to getting legislation on the books that will prevent it from ever happening again.
Hahahaha. “Legislation on the books.” Get it? Like that’s what you say about passing legislation successfully, but also it would be legislation on books? God I’m funny.
But let’s talk synopsis. To Kill a Kingdom is (allegedly) a high fantasy about this gal Lira. Lira’s a siren - the princess of the sirens. Sirens RIP the HEARTS out of dudes!! Pretty rad stuff, violent af, we love it. Lira is especially badass, and she ONLY steals the hearts of princes. F*ck the system, girl, I get it. Take down the patriarchy/our capitalist oppressors/etc etc. I’m still into it.
Here’s where you lose me.
This is a Little Mermaid retelling (okay actually still rad) in which Lira is given human legs because she takes a heart without it being her birthday (she can only take a heart for every year yadda yadda) and her mom (the queen, a Very Bad Lady) says oh you think you’re so tough??? Okay. Get me the heart of an Extra Special Prince - the Siren Killer.
Dun dun dun!
This might sound good, unless you’re like me and cynical and well-versed in YA and you know what that actually means. Because if you guessed “Lira will now participate in a not-so-slow burn but absolutely teeming with sh*tty banter romance with the Siren Killer himself, Elian,” you’re today’s lucky winner! Congratulations. Your prize is universal suffering.
This should have been violence and revenge and piracy and maybe some cool monarchical world-building if there’s time. Instead, it was boring and romance and boring and terrible banter and boring and confusing info dumps and boring and weird flat writing and oh my god you guys this book was so f*cking BORING!!!
I hated this book!!! It’s been so long since I’ve read garbage YA fantasy that I almost forgot why I don’t read YA fantasy like ever!!! Contemporaries can be worse than fantasy could ever be but they are never so horrible to read.
Like, let’s talk about the basic requirements of high fantasy that this book does not even BEGIN to satisfy. For one, language??? It’s not that hard to not use slang!! And like I’m SO sorry but when you’re pretending you’re writing high fantasy while using the word “okay” it doesn’t work for me again I’m SO sorry.
And if you’re going to write a standalone about a world with one hundred separate island kingdoms and do this bad of a job worldbuilding, honestly please at least give me a map so I can gaze lovingly at it and pretend to enjoy it. This world could have been so cool but we get basically zero geographical or historical or general information, just weird random details about specific island-nations, and I’m quite seriously sick of it!!!
I hated the romance. It was mostly banter that was just uniquely terrible, really just a whole new level of unfunny and bad but with characters being like “Wow...she is very funny...I quite like her...ha ha dare I say she is one of the gang...lol you may have met your match, dear sir...sounds like someone else I know...ha ha ha, I kid, oh yes, we have fun, lmao.”
Also as established, the language is like one step above using text abbreviations anyway.
Anyway once we get past the banter stage of the romance, we jump straight into “icky gross touchy feely lovey dovey I hate it get it away from me.” And then betrayal, and then more of that again! It’s painful in a hundred different ways and it never gets better.
Part of this is because THE CHARACTERS ARE AWFUL!!! Lira is nowhere near the cool violent siren I EXPECTED and DESERVED. She’s just mean and prissy and thinks she’s really funny and badass but god she is not at all. A lot like another red-haired fishy nemesis of mine.
And Elian is just...boring. The siren song of the YA male love interest. A real poor little rich boy type situation. SO SORRY YOU MIGHT HAVE TO RULE OVER AN ISLAND MADE OF GOLD, ASSHOLE. WE WEEP FOR YOUR SUFFERING, WE REALLY DO.
Speaking of boring, this sh*t had absolutely no right to be and yet here we are. This is the most boring book in the history of ever. I don’t get it! The world-building was god awful, half the characters were flat, there was no setup or explanation or exposition of any kind, and yet NOTHING HAPPENS IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE BOOK. I got halfway through and thought I was only a fraction of the way in! Nope, just bad writing!
How do you pitch a violent siren/pirate high fantasy YA retelling of the Little Mermaid and somehow make it boring? That’s almost so awful it turns in on itself and becomes impressive.
Almost.
Plus this wasn’t violence-y anyway. It was just “““character development.””” Elian spends half the book crying about how it’s so mean of him to kill sirens (they’re only killing his people for no reason, guys!) and Lira spends half the book thinking about how it’s too mean of her to kill someone as
We get no violence. We get pondering and crying and more pondering and the ultimate condemnation of violence and it is a hundred thousand million times worse than if this were a straightforward Little Mermaid retelling with no violence at all.
Bottom line: Boring. Bad characters. Bad romance. Bad world-building. Weird bad writing. Bad, inaccurate synopsis. Boring boring boring, bad bad bad.
------------------------
update
This review was discussed on the Hey Good Bookin' podcast! I have never felt cooler.
------------------------
pre-review
Really starting to think you guys all just pretended this book was good and got me all excited to read it as some sort of elaborate, cruel prank.
IT WAS BAD AND NOW I'M DISAPPOINTED.
review to come once I recover from this (read: NEVER. I'LL NEVER GET OVER IT)
------------------------
currently-reading updates
I hadn't picked up this book in a couple days and assumed I was like 1/4 of the way into it, since nothing has really happened yet.
NOPE.
I'M MORE THAN HALFWAY DONE.
WHEN ARE WE GOING TO GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.