How I Stole the Princess's White Knight and Turned Him to Villainy

Maybe more of a 1.5 star/s but rounded down for reasons that I shall get into in a few.

So, first of all, I don't think this series is for me. Which hurt, because I love the idea of it: little bite-sized fantasy adventures with a knight and a black sorcerer and a somewhat horrid princess lurking in the background.

This adventure was particularly fun as it featured a creature hunt. And introduced us to Niran - Tan's brother - who is 100% made of awesomeness. I laughed twice during this book and both time was because of his words. He is made of win and I absolutely adore him. (Don't adore the voice the narrator gives him, but, that is what it is.)

Wells has some more screen time and he's a good character, but, honestly, he's going down the same doomed path as Devan. Speaking of whom, I do like Devan, but he's a little too ‘already in lust with Tan' for me. (And falling into the trap of ‘he doesn't listen when I push him away, so why bother trying anymore?')

Fa - Tan's sister - is... borderline okay. So far, she's not awful, but I could easily see her character going either way. I want to like her, but I can already see a lot of Tan's obsessive, creepy, thoughtless personality traits in her.

And Tan. You can likely already guess where this is going. Tan is creepy af. What makes this even worse - and him even creepier - is that he is obviously not supposed to be. I'm likely supposed to find him cute and charming and funny - but the way he tromps over the boundaries Devan attempts to create, the proprietary attitude his has about ‘his knight' and the extremely gross way he thought that if Devan didn't agree to something that he would ‘just figure out a way to keep him there' is not cute or charming or funny. It's HUGE redflags about an asshole creep.

If you don't mind hugely unhealthy relationships in fiction, you might not have a problem with this, naturally - unless, of course, you think Tan 95% of the time acts like a petulant child (which he does) and cannot conceive of anyone finding him appealing (well... yeah).

I thought maybe my issues with Tan were blown out of proportion in the first book, but in this one he is constantly creepy and just generally the poster-boy for ‘beware these actions' in a love interest. (And, also, single handedly ruined what could have been a solidly enjoyable fantasy romp and turned it into one of the worst things I've finished this year.) (And truly wouldn't have finished it except I wanted to give him a solid shot and didn't have anything else to listen to while at work. ... It made a short job seem nigh unbearably long, though. So... Kudos for that?)


Edited to add:

Oh, and by the way, this volume has tags listed. While most of them are not for me (tm) - the biggest warning is buried almost at the end of the word vomit ‘reluctant to lovers'. wtf? First of all, this should have been ‘tagged' on the first one so that people knew what was trying to pass itself off as ‘cute and charming'. Secondly, just admit that ‘reluctant to lovers' is creepy non-con until you're Stockholm syndrome-d into thinking it's all kosher.

WARNING!!

It's not all kosher!!