Title: King Consort
Author: J.R. Gray
Publisher: Amazon/Kindle Unlimited
Length: 279 Pages
Category: Contemporary
At a Glance: King Consort started out nicely enough, but the ending felt rushed and unrealistic, too effortless and convenient. All in all, I wasn’t impressed with this story.
Reviewed By: Ky
Blurb: Avoiding sleeping with women was my specialty, an art form even. As the future King of England I couldn’t be caught sleeping with men. My whole life played out in front of the paparazzi, and they didn’t miss a thing.
I had a carefully crafted womanizing persona to maintain. My life came with rules, all of which I broke when I couldn’t resist a one night stand with the enemy: A beautiful paparazzo with a heart of gold. He may be the only person who doesn’t want me for my title, and he can never be anything more than my secret.
But secrets have a way of coming out and not only will they scare him away, but they’ll lose me the crown.
Review: This royal romance didn’t deliver for me. I didn’t like the way the characters acted most of the time; they seemed immature and their actions didn’t reflect their supposed personalities. They didn’t think of the repercussions of their actions even though we saw them talking about how they had to be careful about what they did. About halfway through there was an unexpected sequence of sex scenes. I skipped many of them because they didn’t add anything to the story, and there were too many of them.
What I got from all that was that the characters, who were supposed to be responsible adults, acted like immature teenagers thinking with their little heads and not able to wait until they were somewhere private. Especially Louis, the heir, should have been able to control himself and not take risks like that since he didn’t want his sexuality to get out. He didn’t act like that, though. He acted like he couldn’t care less who saw him behaving inappropriately and took unnecessary and stupid risks. I don’t know if it was supposed to be sexy or convey to the reader that they were so passionate they couldn’t control their actions or whatever, but that’s not what it looked like from my point of view. I would have expected something like that from Louis’ sister, since she was supposed to be the wild one, uncaring about her image and just wanting to have fun, but not from responsible Louis.
I always require a HEA for the stories I choose to read, but in this case, I would have preferred not to get one so that the story could have been more realistic. Maybe that has to do with the fact that I wasn’t able to connect or really care enough for either character, but I was rooting for a bittersweet end and not the neatly tied one we got.
I had a few issues with the way the story was told. I was constantly confused about who was talking, the POV changes between Louis and Xavier, but the story is always told in the third person and pronouns replaced the names of the characters so often that it was really difficult to tell who the “he”, “him” or “his” was referring to. It became even more confusing when you added the errors in the text. Also, I lost the thread of conversation sometimes; the writing style was probably not a match for me because often Xavier and Louis talked about something, I wasn’t able to figure out what they were referring to. That has to do with me, though, and maybe no one else will pick up on it.
All in all, I wasn’t impressed with this story. It started out nicely enough, though I didn’t particularly like the circumstances under which the MCs started their relationship. I did like their talks and the way Louis always tried to sneak out for a while so he could have some quiet time to talk with Xavier away from the craziness of his life. The ending felt rushed and unrealistic, too effortless and convenient. As I said, I think that a bittersweet one would have been more suitable for the length of this book and the pace of the story.
You can buy King Consort here:
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