Review: To Kill A Kingdom by Alexandra Christo
Overview:
Rating: 3 out of 5.
I finished To Kill a Kingdom last week, but I read an entirely different book and finished its corresponding review before returning to write this one. I just didn’t really feel one way or another about this story. It’s not bad; there were a couple of cool elements (such as the use of linguistics to elevate the world-building), but the character development and the dialogue were not there for me.
Content Warning:
To Kill a Kingdom contains profanity, gore, familial death, verbal/physical abuse, and references to slavery.
Book Description:
To Kill a Kingdom is a standalone YA Fantasy. Loosely based on The Little Mermaid, it tells the story of Lira (a siren princess turned human) and Elian (a human prince turned pirate). The inhabitants of the land and the sea have been locked in a centuries-long battle for worldly control, and our characters’ paths cross on an epic quest to find an ancient stone that will tip the balance of power one way or another. The only question is, will they both come out of the journey with their hearts intact?
On the Dual Narratives [spoilers]:
I picked up this book because Lira’s narrative in the first chapter is so striking. The story literally starts with her digging up the hearts of princes she’s murdered, and I was excited by the notion of a YA novel with an amoral, murderous main character. In the end, it didn’t stay that way — the power of love showed her there was another way and yada yada yada. BUT at least this transition from evil to good demonstrates reasonable character development. Elian, on the other hand, is a pretty stagnant character. His biggest conflict is that he doesn’t want the responsibility of being a prince, but he’s never forced to confront this fear. In the epilogue, it’s revealed to us that his sister ends up ruling his kingdom so he can live life as a pirate. The readers never get to see the moment he decides to choose this path, and it feels like a cop-out. Without this crucial moment, there is no character growth. He stays relatively the same the whole story and, thus, is a boring narrative.
On the Dialogue:
The dialogue in this book is unconnected at points. Christo places large chunks of description between character’s responses to one another so that by the time I got to the next spoken line I had already forgotten what the subject of conversation was. Additionally, there were lots of awkward turns of phrase and characters tended to use numerous unspecified nouns, contributing to further confusion of subject matter. The book wasn’t necessarily hard to read, but the flow of the conversation often felt muddled. Some simple editing to restructure and clean up phrasing would have made the book much easier to understand.
On the Linguistics and World-Building:
The nerd in me was super excited by the ways Christo used linguistics to distinguish Elian’s and Lira’s cultures from one another. For example, establishing that Lira didn’t have the words to describe love or equal partnership in relationships really highlighted the cruelty and prioritization of functionality in the sirens’ world. There were only one or two other similar uses of language in the text, but they increased the overall world-building for me by tenfold.
On Who Might Enjoy To Kill A Kingdom:
I recommend you read this book if you:
enjoy dark retellings of classic fairytales and Disney classics
appreciate the enemies-to-lovers trope
like quest-based stories
PLEASE NOTE: Image sources for the photo edit on this post can be found here.