Review on 'King of Patriam' by Amizah R🥷

Amazon Link: https://amzn.eu/d/gcnkiwQ

Author: Amizah R

Format Read: eBook Pages: 759 Publication Date: 30th June 2023

Author Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amizahwrites/ Author Website: N/A

Content Warnings:

Strong Language, Extremely graphic Violence, Sexually explicit scenes, Pregnancy, Childbirth, Child abuse, Child endangerment, Abduction, References to Miscarriage, References to homophobic, References to Sexism, References to suicide.

Review:

And here it concludes! I have finally finished the Queen of the Dome series and this book has made me fearful, angry, sad. It's been one hell of an emotional rollercoaster, with these characters for 700 pages, and that's just this book. I can't forget the other two books that built up this incredible world. And I thought the drama and the danger was bad in the first two. Woah! did they have a lot in store for me.

The second book ended on a cliffhanger, with Salem being locked in a room by Cassian so he can go to the combat trials. He wanted to fight so that he would become the King of Patriam, and they can finally get rid of Pola once and for all. Whilst he is away, barely a few hours after his departure, Salem escapes and winds up in tracking him to the forest. Staying hidden in the trees, she saves him mutiple times without him knowing. By the time he wins the trials and arrives back home, he finds out Salem had escaped and has now been kidnapped, by none other than Pola's ex-husband, Potak. Potak keeps Salem for a while, in a underground kingdom, until one of her maids returns her home where Cassian has been searching for her. However, much to Cassian’s dismay his world around him starts to collapse because even though she is safe, she is terribly scared of him after Potak changed her memories. The Primas, the Domes all power ancestors, are invading and the danger gets worse for the people of Terra. The council have to fight to stay alive loosing people and digging into the darkest parts of themselves. In the end, we do finally get a happy ending, after 98 chapters, and the found family stays intact but to get there, they have to deal with a lot that nobody should ever have to go through.

The middle of this book was unbelievable. Salem and Cassian had been separated due to her kidnapping and what Potak was doing to her was horrible to read as he was torturing her. I’ve read disturbing content in fiction books, but I still hate when it happens, even if it does drive the plot forward. I was definitely not expecting this to happen in this book, or to be honest any of these books, but it definitely added to the story and was a plot twist that was shocking.

I truly felt hate towards Deianira and Cade in this book. I was shocked that I actually hated them for a while, not because I don’t think they are genuinely good people but because I think they were making some incredibly, misguided decisions. It was so frustrating to read the decisions and choices they were making with the reasons they were making them being understandable but unacceptable. I predicted that they would get better by the end of the book and they did, but to watch characters that I loved in book 1, turn their backs on people, was hard.

We also meet many new people who join to team and family like Aiko and Don, Salem’s brothers, who help Cassian try to find her. We watch them gain relationships with the originals as well as budding romances with the other newcomers. Don ends up with Devin’s sister Akilah, which everyone including the characters question, but hey ho love is love. It’s so sweet to have all these couples being built  throughout the book series along with the main couples. It shows through all the horrific events they can do anything and you hope in the darkness there will always be light.

The day before I finish the book, before I went to bed, I stopped on a chapter that created a very bad Cliffhanger. It’s one of those ones where you have to think about all the other options that could have been to compartmentalize the problem that has occurred. Just for it to get worse when I continued the novel the next morning. The story just got more confusing!? I later learnt that what I had read the previous night was not the “real story” and because of Amizah’s incredible writing, you go on a journey with the characters as they, along with you, learn what is happening. The way it was structured had me hanging on there for a moment, as I was really upset with the situations I was reading, that it got to a point that I didn't want to carry on with the story if it was just going to end in heartbreak. But, because I am stubborn, I just had to get on with it. I needed to know what was going on. Somehow, Amizah managed to figure out a way to put me on that rollercoaster ride of devastated to joy. And that is impressive to do especially as when what was happening tends to be expected in the last book of a fantasy series. Most people prepare themselves to not have the complete character set at the end, though we are never truly prepared. Throughout there was a lot of moments where I was dreading the next page, but by the end of the novel I was given reprieve.

I really do recommend reading this book series. It’s fantasy. It's family. It’s friendship. It’s romance. It's action. It's war. I think this book could have a lot of things for everyone’s interests. It was interesting. It was shocking. It was brutal. It was plot driven. And with all of this I’m really happy I finally bought this series and now I have no words for how incredible it was (though I suppose I have written over a thousand words here! Oops!) Obviously, there's moments and characters that annoyed me but, in the end, everyone came together when they needed to, just like I thought they would. It's one of those books where you laugh, you cry, and you want to scream and shout and throw the book across the room (don’t recommend that though😊). But those are the best types of books. The ones where you're so involved and in so deep with the characters, that you feel like you’re with them, and they are with you. You’re a part of their world. It’s one of the ones where you can escape. This book has a very deep place in my heart, and I hope it could be in yours as well.

Until the next chapter,

#BellesBookBabble