crystaltran 's review for:

Playboy King by Meg Xuemei X

1.5

adventurous dark lighthearted slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Plot

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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did i go into this dark fantasy romance expecting literary genius? no. was i still a little disappointed in it? yeah :/

i found the plot to be really cool- an alpha king finds his mate by chance, but by the time this happens he’s already launched the Underworld Bride Trails where every contestant has to fight to the death for his hand in marriage. but despite the plot being really cool and original, i feel like it wasn’t taken advantage of at all and the entire thing fell flat. 

the actual writing was pretty good, and the pieces of world-building we got was really neat, but there just wasn’t a lot of it. in fantasy books, i think it’s super important to have strong-building so readers understand the world and can also stronger relate to characters that are usually not human. but the world-building and lore was so poor in this book, i felt a strong disconnect from all the characters, i didn’t understand a lot of their choices, and it feels like there’s no stakes so i frankly didn’t care. there’s a lot of different creatures and superpowers involved, but there’s no introduction to any of it, so it just feels like a bunch of jumbled things thrown together. 

the actual plot too is barely used. this book is a series, but we only see one singular round of the competition in this book, and it takes places over the course of maybe three of the chapters. the rest is just the main characters pining over each other, which got boring really fast. it’s also absolutely a case of insta-love, and the relationship between the characters is not strong enough to stand on its own because there’s very little chemistry. 

the characters also get together very quickly, which didn’t make sense in the context of the bride trials, so i don’t really understand how it would even continue through the rest of the rounds, but i don’t plan on finishing the series so i guess we’ll never find out! interesting concept, but poor execution.