The Letdown

Book Review – Kingdom of the Feared by Kerri Maniscalco

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to run a marathon, a really hard one (like Boston) and trip, fall, and suffer a compound fracture of your femur only a few feet before the finish line? Well, if you haven’t, just read the last volume in this series and you’ll have some approximation of what I’m getting at.

I try to be careful with being overly mean in reviews, and I don’t intend the above statement to sound as cruel as it probably does, but what I’m trying to impart is the sheer, abject disappointment I felt over reading this last book in comparison to how much I enjoyed the first two volumes. So if my sentiments seem hyperbolic to the extreme, it’s only because this book disappointed me that much.

World-building that was shaky and a little ephemeral in the first two books sailed into the stratosphere here, meaning I often had no idea what was going on, or where we were, or what the rules were. This is fantasy, and in fantasy there are rules in your world, and if the reader doesn’t have a decent understanding of them, they’ll be lost and will end up hating your book. Unless they’re just here for the smut, in which case who cares, right?

I mention that only because it seems like all of the smut (of the explicit sort) that wasn’t present up to this point is literally dripping (ew) from every page here. It’s basically a fuck sandwich, since the book both opens and closes with sex. I’ve hopefully made it clear in prior reviews that I have absolutely zero issue with smut, and in fact quite enjoy it, but only in context of the story. If it’s just thrown in to have smut present, it kind of inures the reader to it. There’s a reason erotica is separated from romantic fiction (of any variety). This read like it wanted to be erotica.

The problem with wanting to be erotica is that unless the sex is written well, it’s going to be more annoying than enjoyable. Maybe you guys are able to get off by reading any combination of the words “thrust”, “hard”, “moan”, “nipples”, “cock”, “core” (can we come up with another euphemism for the clit, please?), but I need a little variety with my spice. What I’m trying to say is that for all its abundance the smut here is trite, sophomoric, and just boring. Take a look at A Court of Silver Flames, for example. The smut is frequent there, but it’s at least moderately well written. It is possible to tire of frequent-if-well-written sex scenes, and ACOSF is a perfect example of that. KotF, on the other hand, is textbook poorly-written-too-frequent smut. You’ll get tired of the latter much quicker than you will the former, trust me.

I feel like I could overlook all of this, or at least a lot of it, if the story was good, but it diverged so much from what I thought I was getting after the first volume that I can’t in good conscience give it my personal seal of approval. Maybe the author really had planned and plotted this whole thing out from the beginning, but I had the distinct sense that she was almost making it up as she went along, or to put it in terms that make sense in the world of this book, throwing pasta at the wall and seeing if it sticks to tell whether or not it’s al dente. They’re witches, but they’re not. They’re goddesses, the entire first book basically existed in some pocket dimension version of the Matrix that was for some reason set in Sicily. By the way, can I tell you how much I hate when authors do that?, i.e. pull some bait & switch on the readers by undoing an entire prior book in a series in a few pages. All’s well that ends well if said book is actually good, but if it sucks, it basically makes it impossible to enjoy the prior books, because all you’ll be able to think about is how what you’re reading now is a big fat lie.

I suppose it might be fun to go back and try to find the clues that might have been left as to the real nature of the story (the Harry Potter series does this on an expert level) but if it’s not laid out well, even if the author kind of switched gears in subsequent novels but couldn’t construct the ensuing story well enough around it (without a total re-write) to make it all make sense, you’re basically just setting fire to prior manuscripts. Sometimes you can’t avoid that – look at how Lestat basically says Louis lied about meeting him in that dilapidated mansion in “Interview with the Vampire” because according to what he says in “The Vampire Lestat” he would have been underground at that time. Anne Rice had decided the story needed to change, and the only way it could make sense in the context of what she was doing now was basically just to say the prior narrator lied. Weak, to be sure, but it’s all she could really do without a straight-up rewrite, which would be impossible at that point.

I don’t intend to go back and re-read Kingdom of the Wicked for this, because I’m lazy and my TBR is looooong, but I did do this with ACOTAR last year, and let’s just say that Sarah J Maas didn’t do a good job of covering her tracks, so to speak. She kind of pulled a Lestat with Rhysand’s whole explanation, which is all fine and good, but when the rest of the text doesn’t support a lot of what’s said by other characters (particularly concerning things other characters said or did) it’s easy to call bullshit. I have no idea if that happened in KotW, but from what I remember there were not any hints that the world of that book was basically an illusion, so I get the impression that the author came up with this whole reveal after the fact – which is all fine and good, but again, surprises like that totally lose their effectiveness if there aren’t at least some hints at the real reality in retrospect. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I read that book twice, and I’m recalling nothing, even with my ADHD-addled brain.

All of this is to say that I feel like I can’t go back and enjoy the books I enjoyed before after reading a book that I hated that essentially dismantles what came before it. It’s like going back into the Matrix without having your memory wiped; Cypher was right, ignorance really is bliss.

A couple of other points that bare mentioning:

• I am seriously bothered over how Emilia had to give up her power, after finally coming into it after much suffering and trials, in order to have the man she loved love her back. I know Wrath was bound by a curse, yada yada, but what does it say that the only way said curse can be lifted is by a woman physically weakening herself to the point where she is once again subservient to a man. You do get this nice little thing at the end where Wrath shares his power with Emilia after she’s crowned queen so she gets her magic back, but I see less romance in that than I do women needing to have their power granted by men when it should be innate (as it previously was here). It just left a really bad taste in my mouth. Let’s not even mention that Emilia actually remarks (actually!) after losing her power that it sucks and makes her sad but she’ll be okay because her husband is hot and she likes fucking him a lot so as long as she can still do that she’s good? I mean what the actual fuck?!
• What does it say when your FMC keeps getting kidnapped just as she’s about to finally have p-in-v sex with the MMC? I mean they eventually do it, but it almost smacks of subconscious sex education. Again, more bad taste in mouth.
• I understand that the metaphorical shackles of human sexual limitation are lifted once Emilia becomes a goddess, or realizes she was one all along, but to go from total prudishness in book 1 to public oral sex in book 3 without any other explanation for the change in character other than she realized she’s a goddess so it’s okay for her to have sex now? Like it would have been so bad before? Again, I know that anything in book 1 is essentially negated by book 3, but again, what is the author saying here, either consciously or subconsciously?

So I realize I rambled here, but that’s sort of my thing – I’m not sure it’s the plot that’s important in reviewing a book so much as the feeling the book left you with. I mean, this isn’t a book summary, it’s a review, and my review is that this is not a good book for multiple reasons, chief among them the complete and total deconstruction of previous book’s events. Engaging in revisionist history is basically an automatic DNF, or I should say NRA (never read again) seeing as how I did finish this, if only out of respect for the fact that I liked the first two volumes and enjoyed the author’s other work (the Stalking Jack the Ripper series). Maybe it’s the way that Emilia’s total personality 180 is essentially juxtaposed with copious amounts of poorly written sex scenes that kills it for me…I’m not really sure. I just know that I hated it almost from the jump because literally all the groundwork in books 1 and 2 were upended here and quickly and it felt like I was reading a completely different book with completely different characters in a completely different universe.

I’m confused because there are so many high ratings on this, and whenever I see a disconnect between popular opinion and my own, I always question myself….which is pretty fucked up. What’s considered good is so often objective though, even where “great” literature is concerned. Ultimately it comes down to whether or not something ticks your boxes and gives you what you expected, and when it doesn’t, you come away disappointed.