A fashion choice here, an iconic scene disguised as something else/distorted there… A lot of the fun and intrigue of reading To Kill a Kingdom is being able to spot these glorious little nods and easter eggs.

The level of violence is occasionally intense, usually involving swords but sometimes claws and teeth. We are in a world that is in the past where we have old pirate books, sirens, magic etc AND YOU SAY THAT? At the start of TO KILL A KINGDOM, Princess Lira causes the death of one of her fellow sirens and earns the wrath of her mother, the Sea Queen.Those two were both confident in their own skin and it was really refreshing to have two characters that know exactly what they want. Elian says that the relationship between Kye and Madrid has managed to keep Kye from getting himself in deep trouble. To Kill a Kingdom does feel like a debut novel at times, but it somehow only served to reinforce the positive impression it made on me. Lira tasted freedom for the first time in her tragic life, she tasted humanity, and compassion she could not comprehend.

This should have been violence and revenge and piracy and maybe some cool monarchical world-building if there’s time.Anyway once we get past the banter stage of the romance, we jump straight into “icky gross touchy feely lovey dovey I hate it get it away from me. To me this book doesn’t feel like a standalone because I have grown to care for these characters impossibly fast, and I will miss them dearly. Some of the male characters are a little too good to be true but that doesn’t spoil any part of the story. And I need a strong human prince that can’t be fooled by her and hunts wicked sea witches for sport.

Our Sirens Are Different: Sirens are depicted as beautiful women with the lower body of a fish who use their songs to hypnotize and kill sailors. From the descriptions of the sirens to the ways in which sirens and humans murder each other to the general world in which the novel takes place. It’s a well-known fact that sirens are beautiful, but the bloodline of Keto is royal and with that comes its own beauty. Lira is given till the winter solstice to give her mother Prince Elian's heart or remain a human forever.Lira begins her narration stating nonchalantly that she collects the hearts of princes, while Elian claims that he's a murderer, and that's not his worst trait. The author switches between the two time periods effortlessly and easily which doesn’t always happen in these kinds of books. Where would I be, as a person and in society, without the enemies-to-lovers trope where two people, who are actual literal enemies fighting on opposite sides of a conflict and who can hold their own against each other and even in their hatred have a begrudging respect for the other, come together on equal ground and slowly realize that they have more in common than they’d first thought, they don’t instantly get along but bicker and deny and fight their way into a tentative friendship that is born of a deep understanding and trust and respect found in companionship which later slowly blossoms into a whirlwind of a romance, and the best part?