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Review: Prince of Shadows – R.J. Vickers

Prince of Shadows - R.J. Vickers

Genre: Action-Adventure, Fantasy, Historical

LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Gay, Lesbian

Reviewer: Vin, Paranormal Romance Guild

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About The Book

War is coming. The last free city of magic stands on the brink of ruin. 

Pushed onto a throne he never wanted, Prince Daymin faces a bleak inheritance: a kingdom overrun by enemy troops and a capital nearing starvation.

The capital only remains free because it is guarded by a ring of trees that can move at the will of the people who live among them.

But the alliance wears thin.

Soon the trees will abandon the capital, and Daymin’s people will face one last, desperate fight for survival.

A fight they cannot win.

While his mother, Queen Kalleah, journeys overseas in search of allies that may not exist, Prince Daymin must fight battles of both swords and diplomacy as he wrestles his kingdom’s army into shape.

Yet he is merely buying time. The Whitish army is an unstoppable force, and its king will not rest until he has destroyed the last of Daymin’s people.

The Review

Prince of Shadows is the story of the kingdom of Itrea, which twenty years prior was attacked by the country of Whitland. Baylor is the last city standing, and due to the fear of being besieged by the Whitish, it has been faltering. Fearing the demise of her people, Queen Kalleah seats her son Daymin on the throne and heads off on a dangerous voyage to attempt to win some allies for her kingdom.

Young Daymin does his very best to protect his people in his mother’s absence. Many of the powerful families of Baylor conspire against him however, and the magical trees guarding the walls threaten to pull back into their forest. This would leave the citizens of the city at a massive disadvantage against the Whitish army. Daymin sends a spy – Idorii – into a Whitish fortification in order to discover their plans and possibly gain the upper hand.

There are several other characters who have a couple of chapters of their own: you learn of Jayna, a young girl who dreams of becoming the record keeper of Itrea. The book also contains some intriguing chapters from the point of view of the Whitish ruler Edreon.

I feel like Kalleah’s journey was at times very rushed, and at other times dragged, and didn’t add much to the story for me. I found the book to be rather slow to start, and I often felt like I was missing key pieces of information that might have helped endear some of the characters to me. I discovered after that there is another series that comes before this one that occurred 20 years earlier during the initial Whitish attack.

Overall, I did enjoy Prince of Shadows. Daymin was very likeable as a character and I loved seeing his development. I greatly enjoyed Idorii and Jayna’s chapters, and I even liked learning what was going on in Edreon’s mind.

The Reviewer

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