Review: King of Battle and Blood by Scarlett St. Clair

  As part of an ongoing series of shamelessly sharing my thoughts with the world on books that no one asked that I review, I will begin with one particularly unremarkable book.

King of Battle and Blood was published in 2021 and is another one of countless fantasy romances published Post-ACOTAR*. You can tell right off the bat with the "Blank of Blank and Blank" title that so many authors think will set them apart. The more they try to play around with the words, the less I am inclined to read them. Kindle Unlimited makes it really easy to find almost all of these and I've never seen one that wasn't discounted.

But I digress...

About the Author

Scarlett St. Clair lives in Oklahoma with her excellent dog. She has a master's degree in library sciences and informational studies. She is obsessed with Greek mythology, murder mysteries, love stories, and the afterlife.

It sounds like a high schooler asked the author to describe herself in 3 sentences for the yearbook caption. This is directly from the last page of the book. From the series title page, this is her most recent book after a trilogy about a retelling of the Hades and Persephone romance (also brought back from popularity since Lore Olympus blew up on Webtoon and became a published graphic novel) and then another standalone on Hades. I have not read any of her Greek mythology retellings, but I am having trouble not drawing parallels, which brings me to my main point:

This is a Hades x Persephone retelling, with different characters and slightly different circumstances in a made-up world with hard-to-pronounce landmasses and cities.

About the Book (Beware Spoilers)

Isolde (Issi) de Lara is a free-spirited warrior princess at one with her womanly wiles and sexuality. She is 25 years old, unmarried and everyone is fine with it in this medieval-time fantasy book. Her father, Henri, loves her very much, and her mother is dead. 

Her House Lara (there are 8 others) is under perceived attack by an army of vampires led by the Blood King, Adrian Aleksandr Vasiliev, so her father is ready to surrender the kingdom and give in to vampire rule; no one is happy about this because Adrian has been on a conquering spree all over the continent. He wins because of his army of vampires - it takes five humans to take one vampire down.  Apparently, it's love at first sight with him, and he demands her hand in marriage as part of the surrender terms from House Lara. Everyone is up in arms and he threatens to wipe them all off the map if she doesn't say yes. She says yes because her love for her people is greater than her love for her life.

They wed and consummate the marriage - a very spicy scene this one! The next day, she travels three days to the Red Palace with Adrian. They have sex multiple times on the road. Along the way, their army is attacked by desperate humans who want to kill Adrian and end the "war." The humans lose after a murder attempt on Issi and the king, and she finds that her perceived sacrifice in marrying Adrian was taken as a betrayal by her fellow countrymen.

They finally reach the Red Palace; she meets more vampires, including Adrian's four most trusted advisors and friends, and realizes they're more human than she was previously led to believe; there are also surprisingly few of them. She's been having funky visions of some experiences with Adrian she's never had before. 

There's turmoil in the Red Palace - no one trusts the mortal queen. Issi struggles to be a part of his court and with her increasingly intense attraction to Adrian. She doesn't want to love him but obviously, she ends up loving him because it's a book. She unlocks all the funky memories at the end by letting Adrian feed on her - a big deal TM - because it's the greatest show of trust between a vampire and their lover/vassal. 

They're not visions, they're memories from a witch named Yesenia. Apparently, witches all across the land were taken from their homes and burned in a big historical event called - are you ready for this? - the Burning. There were 13 significant witches that made up the High Coven that would advise kings and solve problems with magic. The king before Adrian, Dragos, condemned them and set out to destroy them, feeding people the story that they were evil in order to help persecute them. One of the witches he burned was Yesenia, Adrian's former lover and one of the High Coven witches.

Adrian begged a goddess, Dis, for retribution. She gave him immortality and turned him into a vampire after he prayed to "let [him] taste the blood of [his] enemies." Cheeky goddess. He destroyed Dragos and took over the Red Palace, essentially crowning himself the conqueror of the land after he began marching into surrounding territories. 

Dragos had teamed up with another witch Ravena, who survived these 200 years after Dragos died to plot her revenge. She concocted something called the red mist that was decimating villages between Lara and the Red Palace. She got into the Red Palace to get some journal that Yesenia wrote spells into and invaded the Red Palace with her mist. At this time, Adrian's less trusted advisors tried to kill Issi for being a nuisance and distracting the king, but she got away. Henri, Issi's father, also tried to kill Issi and ended up dying by her hand. She resented him because he let the islanders that her dead mother came from become enslaved by another king who wanted to become a vampire and was refused by Adrian. Issi foiled Ravena's plans by shattering the mirror she was projecting herself from and dissipated the mist. It didn't kill Ravena, however. She got her hands on a spellbook that can raise the dead.

So we get set up for another book. 

About My Thoughts

I won't say it was painful to finish the book. I work from home - I finished it in one day and ignored about 20 emails as they came into my inbox. It was a good story.

However...

We'll start with the Hades x Persephone tropes:

• reluctant wife taken from her home by a powerful male figure that inevitably becomes a romantic interest
•  reluctant wife has misgivings about her new home and eventually realizes she was fed lies about the enemy, they're pretty chill
• reluctant wife struggles to fit in and gain acceptance of the court
• reluctant wife has inner turmoil with her growing feelings for a powerful male figure; torn between love for her home and wanting to stay
• love interests face a bigger brewing problem on the horizon
• reluctant wife winning the friendship of powerful male figures most trusted friends/advisors
• that one action between the love interests that can solve everyone's problem and is holding the plot up for no reason because the reluctant wife isn't ready to accept her feelings.

Those were just off the top of my head after finishing the book and seeing that the author wrote more Hades love stories than anything else.

The Writing and Story:

It's not bad, but it sounded self-published. I caught many spelling mistakes - simple things like "form" instead of "from," repeating proper nouns in a single sentence, and tiny little plot holes (The bruise from the very beginning that Killian gave Issi was a point of contention between Adrian and Killian, but then she wore a sleeveless dress to the wedding and it never came up again.) It was hard to immerse myself when, as I read, I tripped over words because they sounded completely unnatural. The dialogue was also very abrupt in places. No one converses with only questions: "Mourning the sun?", "Looked?", "You are awake." It became tedious hearing my reading voice say "you're awake" and reading "you are awake."

Descriptions were decent, but I couldn't place myself anywhere. I frequently forgot what characters looked like. If you asked me, point-blank, what Issi looked like, I couldn't tell you the color of her hair. What I do know, is Adrian has blonde hair and Issi is tan.

The pace was really fast - I got the sense that the book was supposed to be much longer than it ended up being. Honestly, if it was any longer, I would DNF. So much happened in so few pages that I was a little overwhelmed sometimes. The lore dumping with the library and the conversations with Adrian and Issi's annoying questions were an easy way out with the first-person point of view.

After they got to the Red Palace, Issi was lame and not very defiant about her feelings for Adrian. She didn't even try to kill him again after the first time. I wasn't entirely convinced she was fighting the inevitable - it felt more like she was being uncharacteristically accepting of her situation, even if she was uncomfortable with it. There was no fight against the fears that she was born and raised with; she was weirdly proud and tried to fight everyone too much - it kept the evil vampires from thinking she was weak but it didn't win anyone over. No one in court liked her, only Adrian's close friends because they all knew she was some weird reincarnation of Yesenia.

The background lore was fed to me and I didn't enjoy that. A lot of telling, not much showing. Although the vision in the library was a good scene. It was good until Issi literally thinks to herself: wow, that was Drago and I know I was in Yesenia's place, I wonder what's going on. Just end it there! Where's the mystery? It just makes the plot predictable with no twists that I can't see coming a mile away. 

Issi being scared of fire since birth, Adrian weirdly insisting that he marry her, his friends knowing things about her they shouldn't, the lavender oil to trigger memories, the memory/visions themselves; those were all too glaring to even make figuring it out fun.

The Verdict: 5/10

An enjoyable read, most criticisms were nit-picky about dialogue. But the descriptions really need to be worked on. I couldn't immerse myself very well; the red sky was mentioned liked twice and it's literally the only weather that the vampires get in the Red Palace.

Enticing story but nothing I hadn't read before. It was a jumble of semi-original plot elements and tropes, down to the title. Ultimately, I couldn't tell it apart from the other books that follow a similar plot. If I had to bring it up, the most memorable thing is the vampires and the lore behind them. That was enjoyable but in the end, it was too similar to too many books in the fantasy romance genre these days.

If you want similar books with similar tropes based off my Read list on Goodreads:

• Lord of the Fading Lands by C.L. Wilson (reluctant wife, slow-burn romance)
• City of Thorns by C.N. Crawford (repressed memories, reincarnation, fantasy-romance)
• Wintersong by S. Jae-Jones (reluctant wife, slow burn, family/love interest conflict)
• Neon Gods by Katee Robert (Hades x Persephone retelling, spicy)
• The Bridge Kingdom by Danielle L. Jensen (reluctant wife wants to assassinate new husband, slow-burn romance)
• The Winter King by C.L. Wilson (reluctant wife, slow-burn romance, countries in conflict, love interests differing fantasy species**)
• Radiance by Grace Draven (reluctant wife, slow-burn romance, countries in conflict, love interests differing fantasy species)
• *A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas (reluctant wife, slow-burn romance, worlds hanging in the balance, big plot twists)

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**It's a human and something humanoid-like some ethereal ancient being or glowing night creature but they're humanoid, okay? They're not a bug. Trust me, if you want human x bug romance, it's out there.