Review: Protect the Prince by Jennifer Estep

Protect the Prince

Jennifer Estep

(Crown of Shards #2)

Publication Date: July 2, 2019

Paperback, 448 pages, Harper Voyager

Genres: Adult, Fantasy

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Everleigh Blair might be the new gladiator queen of Bellona, but her problems are far from over.

First, Evie has to deal with a court full of arrogant, demanding nobles, all of whom want to get their greedy hands on her crown. As if that wasn’t bad enough, an assassin tries to kill Evie in her own throne room.

Despite the dangers, Evie goes ahead with a scheduled trip to the neighboring kingdom of Andvari in order to secure a desperately needed alliance. But complicating matters is the stubborn Andvarian king, who wants to punish Evie for the deaths of his countrymen during the Seven Spire massacre.

But dark forces are at work inside the Andvarian palace, and Evie soon realizes that no one is safe. Worse, Evie’s immunity to magic starts acting in strange, unexpected ways, which makes her wonder whether she is truly strong enough to be a Winter Queen.

But Evie’s magic, life, and crown aren’t the only things in danger—so is her heart, thanks to Lucas Sullivan, the Andvarian king’s bastard son and Evie’s . . . well, Evie isn’t quite sure what Sullivan is to her.

Only one thing is certain—protecting a prince might be even harder than killing a queen…

My Review

I said that Kill the Queen was a mix of Ella Enchanted and Victoria Aveyard's Red Queen series, and the same could be said for Protect the Prince. But there’s also some Reign—the CW TV show based on Mary, Queen of Scots—in there too. There’s a lot of court scheming and kind-of-cheesy costumes and dialogue.

Protect the Prince is a good sequel. It gave me some of the things I was missing in the first book: relationships between characters and slightly more character development. However, I still think Estep could do well with learning how to expand her side characters’ backgrounds and voices. Even romance partners. She has a bad habit in all of her books of only having the protagonist seem like a fully-fledged person. So yes, I would seriously love some more character development for Lucas, Paloma, Serilda, etc. I think even Maeven got more character development than they all did. Which is kind of disappointing.

Unfortunately, the bad guy plot twist at the end was unbelievably obvious. That sore spot didn’t prevent me from reading the rest, but it did cause me to roll my eyes sometimes at how obtuse Everleigh was being. Also, random thing, but “Sully” is such a weird nickname for a male hero/love interest. It reminds me of Monsters Inc. It really took me out of the story every time Everleigh called Lucas that. At least call him Sullivan. Or even Sulls would have been better. Yeesh.

Like with book one, I have complaints for this series, but Protect the Prince is still a quick, fun read. If you’re new to adult fantasy, or fantasy in general, this book is an easy introduction. And, if you love hard fantasy, but need something lighter, I think you could read this one and only have a few problems with it.

*Note: I purchased a copy of this book myself. This in no way affected my opinion/review.