READ: February 2016

GENRES: Romance, Fantasy.

AVERAGE RATING: ★★★★★

I put off reading these books for the longest time. I first heard about them a few years ago, and for whatever reason I was never tempted enough to pick them up. With the release of the third and final book a couple of months ago, it started popping up on my Tumblr dash again, so I impulse bought the first book. To be honest, when I started reading Captive Prince I really wasn’t sure that I was going to like it. I didn’t read the synopsis when I bought it, so I’d forgotten that the books were going to deal quite so closely with slavery. Despite that, I ended up staying awake until 3AM reading Captive Prince, and when I finished it up the next day, I began hunting down copies of the second and third book. It’s a really enjoyable, really interesting series. They are kind of “guilty pleasure” books, but I enjoyed them so much that I’m past whatever “guilt” I felt .

Here’s the synopsis:

Damen is a warrior hero to his people, and the truthful heir to the throne of Akielos, but when his half brother seizes power, Damen is captured, stripped of his identity and sent to serve the prince of an enemy nation as a pleasure slave.

Beautiful, manipulative and deadly, his new master Prince Laurent epitomizes the worst of the court at Vere. But in the lethal political web of the Veretian court, nothing is as it seems, and when Damen finds himself caught up in a play for the throne, he must work together with Laurent to survive and save his country.

For Damen, there is just one rule: never, ever reveal his true identity. Because the one man Damen needs is the one man who has more reason to hate him than anyone else.

Before I really get into it, I need to warn you for discussions of slavery, sex slavery, sexual abuse, rape, threat of rape, threat of violence, actual violence, and paedophilia. These issues feature or are discussed in the books at varying levels of intensity, but I’d rather overstate them than understate them. So if any of those things makes you feel uncomfortable, it’s worth seriously thinking about whether you want to read the books.

With that mentioned, let’s get on into my review.

Continue reading “SERIES REVIEW | Captive Prince — C.S. Pacat”