Thank you Macmillan publishing for this book in exchange for an honest review
Synopsis:
Kihrin is a bastard orphan who grew up on storybook tales of long-lost princes and grand quests. When he is claimed against his will as the long-lost son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds that being a long-lost prince isn’t what the storybooks promised.
Far from living the dream, Kihrin finds himself practically a prisoner, at the mercy of his new family’s power plays and ambitions. He also discovers that the storybooks have lied about a lot of other things things, too: dragons, demons, gods, prophecies, true love, and how the hero always wins.
Then again, maybe he’s not the hero, for Kihrin isn’t destined to save the empire.
He’s destined to destroy it . . .
Review:
Okay let’s get into this…
This book was like buying an ice cream cone and then the ice cream rolled out and splatter on the concrete. A fair few moments of staring at the puddle of ice cream and planning your next move. Peering round to see if anyone noticed you did it and then tears of utter disappointment.
Unless you have been hiding under a rock, The Ruin of Kings has been advertised everywhere and been targeted as the book that will stand against George R.R. Martin, Robin Hobb and Patrick Rothfuss. I feel like the hype of being the next Patrick Rothfuss was misleading… cause it ain’t. Comparing a debut novel against these legends, means that the book would generally be a masterpiece. However, I was drawn into the hype and ripping the packaging off with my teeth, and my little brain was going crazy to read The Ruin of Kings. I was sadly not as happy about finishing the book as I was turning the very first page.
I actually begin to panic when they say this book is one out of 5 in a series…. There are going to be five more of them out in the world. This could either mean that this is a 5 book series that will be a death to the amazon rainforest and all the trees there or it will be a series that takes us by surprise and will actually be the next big thing. And to be fair and honest, I will hold my judgement until I have read the rest of the series.
Okay so what was the downfall of this book? It was the timelines and how poorly executed they were. Now bear with me when I explain this because damn it is a lot to process. Kihrin is our main character and his story is broken up into three and you start halfway through his journey. A part of Kihrin’s story is told by the jailor Talon. The rest are taken place in the past, and it is constantly switching back and forth. Not in the interesting way of Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows switching from one chapter to a next and knowing that each character is in the midst of battle and something terrible is around the corner. It switches like ohh this about to get interesting.. oh damn we are back in the present and I have to read pages of idle chit chat to find out what happened. The chapters switch back and forth between the two characters and their view on what happened as well as switching from past to present, and then to add confusion there were footnotes. Don’t get me wrong I do love a good footnote, but this story is like starting in the dark, jumping off a cliff, yelling instructions at you while you fear for your life and you have no idea what to do, how the para shoot works, where the edge of cliff is and if you are going to vomit or shit yourself first from the overwhelming stress of it all. We need to be wooed, cooed and slowly drawn in. Think of how slowly the ice-cream man in the van hands you the ice-cream of your dreams that you salivating to get. The old geezers speed, is what you should be aiming for when setting up a world, characters and plot in just a few paragraphs, not the old geezer in the truck that runs you over with the ice-cream van because he left his glasses at home… Get where I am going with this because honestly, I’m mostly thinking about ice-cream.
You may think I am over judging of this but there was no easing into this story and whenever anyone asked what I thought they would have the simple answer of, “Well I am on page 200 and I’m not too sure what exactly is happening…” Trust me, add body stealing, odd nicknames, unnecessary characters and places and this book is a shambles of a tea party set up for the queen by a group of highly drunk teenagers, blindfolded. Broken plates. Smashed cake. Spilt milk.
Realistically it would have been a lot smoother if the book was in chronological order. Just saying. In my honest opinion, it was like this book had to be extremely complicated for no reason. And when you think of any other massive fantasy author, their wonderful books are dense with information but never complex. Think about it, besides the hard-core bookworms that literally cancel any forms of social activities to read, the remainder of the reading world live a busy lifestyle. Honestly, after working a 8 hour day, feeding the family, cleaning the house, walking the animals, going to the gym and crawling into bed at 11pm to read a few pages of a book, they don’t want overly complicated, they was something marvellous and simplistic. I feel as though The Ruin of Kings, you needed to isolated yourself from the world and read it in one sitting to fully grasp the intention of this book.
And to be fair, it wasn’t a completely horrible book as my ranting may have you believe, but unfortunately this one of those cases were the bad deeds outweighed the good. In the future I may see where the second one may lead, by unfortunately this wasn’t high on my list of books to enjoy.
Rating: 2.5/5
ISBN: 9781250175489
Publisher: Tor Books