Court of Ravens and Ruin
(The Shadow Bound Queen #1)
By: Eliza Raine
Publisher: Self-Published
Publication date: Oct. 4, 2023
Genre: Fantasy New Adult
Rating:
A defiant human woman. A dark fae Prince. Two enemies bound to a marriage that could destroy their world.
Reyna was born a valuable slave to the Gold Court, imprisoned her whole life in a glittering palace by sadistic, greedy fae.
When the palace is raided, she takes her opportunity to escape. But the raid is led by her worst nightmare. The Prince of the most feared fae of all; the Shadow Court. And he wants one thing.
Her. The copper-haired, rune-marked human.Reyna doesn’t know why the Prince has kidnapped her. But when he announces her as his betrothed, she knows that she must escape before she is eternally bound to the monster behind the mask.
Only, when he takes the mask off, he isn’t what she expects. He’s lethal, beautiful and exudes sin. And he needs her.Drawn into a deadly world shrouded in secrets, and desperate to keep her own hidden, Reyna must find a way out. If she doesn’t, she risks more than just death. She risks giving everything to her intoxicating captor.
My thoughts…
I love the idea of this book. The fact that a slave from one fae court is kidnapped and then betrothed to the prince of a different fae court sounded very intriguing to me. Sadly, this story just didn’t work for me.
There’s a lot of mystery around Reyna. I mean, at first there isn’t too much mystery other than her hair isn’t the same color as everyone elses. So that makes her stand out. However, as the story progresses we learn that she is part of a prophecy. What is the prophecy??? We have yet to figure that one out. As well as why her hair color is different. The only thing that is certain is that she’s very combative and doesn’t make the best choices when it comes to anything.
The Prince is also just as mysterious. You know that his father and mother are no longer in the picture and instead the Queen is the wife his father took on before he died. Not only is there a battle between the two of them for whatever reason, but you are given hints that he is not what he seems. Again, we have no clue what that is by the end of the book. We just know that he has been looking for Reyna for some prophecy.
Now that should mean that this book was crazy with excitement… but it wasn’t. It all felt very lackluster to me. The two main characters just seemed typecast and the secondary characters were beyond forgettable that I honestly kept forgetting what names belonged to who, let alone if they were male or female. The whole story just lacked that oomph that I was expecting. Especially from a dark fae story.
This book does end randomly, which was a little off-putting to me since I felt like we didn’t get anywhere with the story. What could have been a moment to learn the secret of the Prince or of Reyna before ending the story was just blah. Nothing to make me feel like I need to pick up the next book. In the end, this just was not at all what I was looking for and I do not plan to continue with the series.
