Hi all! Today I’ll bring to you this Blog Tour review of Crown of Crowns. I got approved for a digital ARC on Netgalley, and then got invited for the blog tour as well, so I decided to combine my ARC review with the Blog Tour in this post.
Title: Crown of Crowns
Author: Clara Loveman
Summary
Every forty years the heirs to the Geniverd Kingdom gather and the whole world watches and waits for the Crown of Crowns to come. The Crown of Crowns is a bird, and whoever head it sits on at that moment, that couple is the chosen one and will be crowned as King and Queen. Kaelyn is an heir to the kingdom, but unlike most heirs, she is in love with Roki, a commoner. When Kaelyn’s brother, Reed, comes back from a brutal warrior training, she refuses to go to the homecoming ceremony after a fight with her mother about her relationship with Roki. She thinks it’s unfair that the moral code is keeping her back from that. The homecoming ends tragical, shattering Kaelyn’s world and leaving her with the choices she made and new choices she will have to make. She is determined to uncover the truth, whatever it takes.
My opinion
First of all, thanks to Netgalley for the digital copy and many thanks to the team at Literally Public Relations for sending me a digital copy!
Overall, this book was pretty good. I liked the premise of it, although I’m not too keen on love stories, the rest of it took me in. The originality of how the King and Queen are chosen was interesting since it was a thing I hadn’t heard of before, so that was awesome. I have part of my bookshelves dedicated to the genre “royal fantasy”, since I have quite some books featuring heirs to a kingdom or a kingdom in ruins or books with royal families. Anyway, this was original and interesting so I was curious for how that would work out.
The story starts off immediately in the middle of a conversation between Kaelyn and Roki, walking along what seems like the reenactment of a market as they used to have. Kaelyn is dressed to look like a commoner but is still too “neat”. They talk about their relationship and how life is as a commoner, since Kaelyn is royal and has no idea how it would feel to be common. The story continues with the homecoming ceremony and the tragedy happening there.
What I didn’t really understand was in the beginning of the book, they mention robots as being Royal Protectors. This seemed interesting, I definitely like that sci-fi part of books, such as Cinder by Marissa Meyer did as well. I looked forward to reading more about them, but they are not mentioned at all throughout the rest of the book, or at least not memorable enough for me to remember it. I didn’t see what use they had to the story, so that was a little disappointing as they seemed to be able to help with quite some problems going on in the kingdom.
The rest of the book dove deeper into the story of Kaelyn and her life. As she is chosen to be the Queen of the Geniverd Kingdom, she’s let in on the Great Secret that apparently every King and Queen know about. This Great Secret made the story quite a bit more interesting after the disappointment about the robots. The Great Secret was another new concept in this genre for me, so that was cool. The way the Crown of Crowns chooses the royal couple to rule and continue to advise them throughout their ruling was pretty well done. They gave advice but gave the King and Queen the ability to make their own decisions still.
As I said, overall, it was pretty good. There were, however, a few things I didn’t understand/like too much, and I’ll make a quick list of them below:
- The robots, as I mentioned before, who were introduced and not mentioned or used in the rest of the book. I didn’t see why they were introduced as such or why they were not used later on.
- The backstory felt like it was missing. The book starts in the middle of a conversation, and this is not a bad thing, but there’s talk about the moral code, about the kingdom, but it is never clearly explained how this moral code works, or why the kingdom became like this, royal and common separated. This made reading about these topics more difficult as I would’ve liked to know more about it
- The love story between Kaelyn and Roki never felt like it was needed for the story. As I said, I am generally not too keen on love stories, so it might just be me. They were madly in love, but still Kaelyn marries royal and keeps thinking about Roki, which felt to me like cheating a bit. She doesn’t actually cheat, but while she’s married and ruling the kingdom with her husband, she keeps thinking about Roki, their relationship, about how much she wants to be together with him, and at the same time accusing her husband of betraying her. It didn’t feel right, and seemed to me only as a motive for a choice she makes later on in the story, which made that choice a lot less likable for me
- The amount of story in this book felt like too much. There are action parts in the book as well, but they seemed to be overshadowed by how much story was around them. Of course, I’d rather have more story than less story, but I kinda felt like it could have been spread about two books instead of only this one. There is so much story and some of it just seemed not relevant to this story. As an example, Kaelyn’s husband also did the Aska Warrior training and at some point, his training backstory is shown in detail, but I didn’t feel like it added much to the story. I thought it would fit better if it were to be told in the beginning in the book and thus making Kaelyn’s brother’s story a little less flat
- The characters and relationships/friendships in general felt a bit flat to me. Most of the time, Kaelyn seems to do everything for her own purposes and not thinking about her friends at all. The characters do have backstories, but they didn’t seem to fit into the story and thus making them seem flat.
Now of course, this seems like I didn’t like the book at all, but that’s not the case. These were just things I personally didn’t like too much, and I simply also didn’t want to spoil too much so I can’t say too much about the parts that I did like.
Book 2 has also been announced, it’s called Godly Sins and it’ll be coming out soon! If you’re interested in the combination of Dystopia and Fantasy I’d recommend this book to you, and if you like story-heavy books, this could also be the book for you!
Have you read this book? Did you like it? Let me know in the comments!
Check out all my reviews here!
-Luci
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