Book Review: Crowned a Traitor by Kate Callaghan
Genre: Paranormal
Age: Young Adult
Format: ebook
This is one of those books that is best described as ‘messy’. The fantasy worldbuilding aspects are all over the place, the main character (Klara) is fairly boring, and there’s a twist at the end that had me rolling my eyes incredibly hard. But not rolling my eyes as much as characters decided to suddenly start winking at everything.
The premise is intriguing and the listed tropes – found family, chosen one – had me interested in the book. But with both this just falls flat. The book itself feels like a load of cliches mashed together. Klara is the daughter of Lucifer and heir to Hell. She lives in Malum, where she is being raised by three queens – Abadon, Lilith, and Eve. She doesn’t know who her mother is (so we can assume early on we’ll find out who it is by the end of the book, and like many other aspects it’s squeezed in without foreshadowing), but she knows she does not want to be the Heiress. The book starts with her trekking to start a new job so she can earn money and escape. It goes wrong, and we then get exposition up until the halfway point.
Things did pick up from here, but it felt like too little, too late, the way the first half dragged made the book feel longer than it was. The worldbuilding is all mashed up, which can work in some cases, but falls flat here with the combination of fairy tales, fantasy archetypes, religious aspects (Lucifer, Eve, Hell, etc), and Greek mythology. It doesn’t quite gel together. The various relationships between Klara and other characters feel weak, whether it’s a rivalry with her half-sister or the romance between her and her childhood bestie, or between her and a werewolf she meets when escaping. There’s no on page chemistry, just characters kissing randomly in a way that makes the romantic aspects feel forced. There’s a child character who is just not written well, coming across at parts as either a young child (4, 5) or a slightly older (7, 8?) child, but never with any consistency.
The magic felt like it wasn’t fully thought out, either. Klara’s powers come down to ‘whatever the plot needs at the time’. The whole ending felt a little rushed, and like I mentioned above, the ‘twist’ is poorly executed. I didn’t understand why characters suddenly started winking at everything either, but they’d also spent most the book smirking at random moments where a smirk felt…inappropriate, or not a thought-out reaction to whatever was happening. The smirking and winking got really distracting.
I think Callaghan had some interesting ideas here, but so much of this feels poorly thought out and a little flimsy, and the book as a whole maybe needed better/tighter editing than it had.
Review by Elle Turpitt
Twitter: @elleturpitt
www.elleturpittediting.com
I received this ebook via NetGalley for review consideration.