[Book Review]: To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo
Review: To Kill a Kingdom by Alexandra Christo
Princess Lira is siren royalty and the most
lethal of them all. Hearts are power, and with the hearts of seventeen princes
in her collection, she is revered across the sea. When a twist of fate forces
her to kill one of her own, the Sea Queen transforms Lira a human as
punishment. Robbed of her song, Lira has until the winter solstice to deliver
Prince Elian's heart to the Sea Queen or remain a human forever. Hunting sirens
is Prince Elian's calling. When he rescues a drowning woman in the ocean, she
promises to help him find the key to destroying all of sirenkind for good--but
can he trust her?—
I tried sooooo
hard to look for this book. I am so glad
that I finally own it! I love fairytales
and their retellings, so naturally I had a lot of anticipation for this. I started reading it the moment I got my
hands on it. I kind of put
some of my current reads on hold in favor of this.
This is a
retelling of ‘The Little Mermaid’, except, the main character, Lira, is a siren
and she bloody hates mermaids! Haha!
I love the
premise of this book, I love the world-building, with the sirens, the mermaids,
the princely siren hunters. I just feel
like it is too short. I wish the book
could be longer. This book only has like
350+ pages, which means that for a book that has a lot to tell, things
progressed really fast.
The character
shift for Lira happened way too quickly that I had a hard time digesting
it. How did she turn from a ruthless
selfish siren princess (who had no trouble allowing her own subject to die just
because she hated said subject for something that she didn’t even remember) to
someone who would willingly take a bullet for someone else?
The side
characters are also under-utilized. They
are poorly fleshed out and are very one dimensional. They are only there for the sake of being
there (and to make Elian look better.)
Those two things
above could have been better if the book was longer. I feel kind of bad, because I only annotated
(and therefore only remembered) the negative aspects, which is unfair because
the book also has loads of positive sides (which I forgot to write down because
I was too eager to read to do anything else #fail).
A good attempt at
retelling The Little Mermaid, but like I said, could have been longer (like 600
pages?).
4/5 hearts!
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