The Liar’s Crown
By Abigail Owen. Entangled Teen.
Twin princesses run in the family. The older twin eventually becomes queen while the younger one is the spare, the one who keeps the older one safe. Meren is a younger twin and lives away from the palace while her sister trains to be queen. When their grandmother, the queen dies, older sister Tabra is to be crowned. Meren will continue to be the backup to her sister. That’s the plan until fate intervenes and she is kidnapped by the Shadowraith. He has his reasons, believing her to be Tabra for much of the book. Meanwhile back at home, the evil Eidolon is “courting” Tabra and the plan is for them to be married soon.
This started out well and I was intrigued by Meren’s experiences growing up apart from the palace and yet a spare for her sister. The mystery of her kidnapper was also a good point of interest and finding out more made it worth continuing to read. I was fully engaged but somewhere before the halfway point, it got bogged down by complicated worldbuilding that didn’t seem to fit into the plot as well as it could. The magical elements were the most let down here. Meren has magic but she hasn’t learned to do much more than make glass figures before she is kidnapped. But with minimal experience, she is suddenly performing major magic and it doesn’t seem very logical to me. In the midst of the magic and worldbuilding and all that, there is a romance blooming and even that seems to speed ahead and become a focus at some points in the story where there wasn’t time for it. It’s like when you watch an action romance movie and they stop the action so the romance can progress. The shadow element left me scratching my head quite a bit. Maybe that’s the point but it felt like there were inconsistencies in how they worked later in the story.
The end was the most interesting part of the second half of the book and left me invested enough to want to find out what happens next. I hope the second book is able to maintain a story that makes sense and is not bogged down with stops in the action to progress the romance. It’s not that I didn’t like the book but my interest definitely waxed and waned.
Overall, I give this 2.5 stars and look forward to seeing how the next part plays out. Thank you to Netgalley and Entangled Teen for giving me this advanced reader copy. I am providing this review voluntarily.