Captive Prince

I've heard so much about this book so I was super excited to finally get my hands on it (Thanks EJ!). And I have to say this book was not what I was expecting. It was very slow and methodical as we came to know the world and the characters. I am a huge fan of political intrigue and politics especially at court, so the majority of the plot was fascinating to me.

However, I feel like I did not get to know the characters as much as I would like. Laurent is still a huge mystery to me and there is so much more I want to know. The one thing we do know is that Laurent and Damen are both strong-headed guys who are beyond snarky. There interactions were spot on and constantly had me smiling to myself. We all know this is a romance and it is clearly a very slow-burning one. They still have so much to learn about one another and have only made a small dent in their relationship.

I'm definitely looking forward to the rest of this trilogy, especially with how this one ended. I also have heard that Prince's Gambit is even better than this one which is exciting.

Interesting story set in a Romanesque fantasy world from the POV of a disposed prince, sent as a slave to an enemy territory by a half-brother that took his throne by coup. Damen (Prince Damianos) is “given” to Prince Laurent of Vere who is seen by everyone as cold and calculating but the more Damen learns about him, the more complex Laurent seems to be.
In this first book, there isn't romance or sex between the main characters making this more a historical fantasy than in the romance genre. There are a lot of references to rape/sexual torture with one scene of two male slave characters having public sex after fighting in an arena as part of Vere's preferred brand entertainment. There is also some scenes of regular torture, such as Damen getting severely flogged. Obviously, this book isn't going to be for everyone because of the violence but I enjoyed it and it didn't feel romanticized at all (Damen himself criticizes and refuses to engage in rape and pedophilia more than once, despite it being more-or-less demanded of him by people of higher rank). Though this first book is very short, the world of Vere seems very complex and interesting and I look forward to continuing on to find out the fates of the characters.

Side note: Not sure if it was the copy I got but there were a lot of weird grammar and sentence structure “errors”. The author is Australian so maybe it's that, but some paragraphs were hard to read and I had to backtrack more than once to understand what was happening.

Review of all 3 books is here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1720533543?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1