Prince of the Sorrows

First of all, though this didn't turn out to be a story I was enamoured by, I'd still recommend it! Most of the things I'm about to mention lean towards personal preference based gripes, so if other reviews and the premise intrigues you then please do give this book a shot.

With that said, I did have some mixed feelings about this.

I think the author's approach to writing world building didn't work for me. There were moments where we were almost abruptly bombarded with extensive purple-prose heavy descriptions of scenery. Instead of adding imagery and whatnot, I think it mostly felt contrived and interfered the story's pacing.

The love interest, Cylvan, is someone who I don't quite know how to feel about. There are so many times where he's so incredibly patronizing—which is a pet peeve of mine—to Saffron (the main character). He treats Saffron like absolute shit in the beginning, and I don't think enough was done to address that initial hostile behaviour. Cylvan goes from hating Saffron to caring for him too fast and suddenly. It felt like there were chapters missing or things that happened off-page between them that I wasn't aware of. Other than that Cylvan was pretty intriguing at times, and was probably the character who—even though I didn't like him as a person—to me, was the most interesting to read about.

Moving on to Saffron, I didn't have any major problems with him, but he felt a bit... basic. He wasn't bland, but his naiveté got pretty annoying and I wasn't very invested in him. I was empathetic when bad things happened to him, but that's about as far as it went for me.

There were times where I liked the writing, but other times it felt very inconsistent. The author oscillated between contrived, indulgent prose to more palatable prose pretty frequently, which kept taking me out of the story.

The plot itself was actually pretty intriguing, minus a few moments where I had to suspend my disbelief a bit, but it wasn't that bad. The ending left me feeling really gutted because it's not satisfying or happy, but I appreciated the amount of emotion it got out of me. I hope Cylvan and Saffron's power dynamic becomes more balanced in future instalments, because that was one thing that kept making me uncomfortable.

But bear in mind that 3 stars is still a good rating for me, and—sans that stuff I mentioned above, of course—I still did end up enjoying the actual story quite a bit!