Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - To Wake a Kingdom

This book made me want to flip a table. I don't have the energy to unpack all the parts of it that enraged me so here are some highlights (spoilers obviously):

incredibly dumb mary-sue MC circa 2006 YA iykyk
we love a story about an empowered female MC who passively witnesses and then actively engages in an incredible amount of violence against women/s
the whole first half of the book is about her trying to save all the people still asleep, and then all the sleeping people die anyways and so there was no point to literally any of it. Not that it seems like she was doing all that much to figure out how to break the curse in the first place
it felt like there was some hope at the beginning with the guy waking her up ending up not being the love interest as expected. I thought that was a good sign for this not being just another retelling of Sleeping Beauty but then it very quickly became just another retelling, true love breaking the curse and all
the whole curse seems very arbitrary. she has a time limit to break it, except no she doesn't because the evil fae is going to ignore her own terms so she can kill everybody, and the other fae knows the entire time how to break it but despite her whole family being slaughtered and her and her charge's lives being in danger she's still just hanging out
not a single character understands politics. not a one
absolutely no explanation of this magic system
the fae are apparently powerful enough to do whatever the fuck they want in the human kingdoms, and don't even see humans as intelligent creatures so??? why is the fae king bothering with this plot to place fae on human thrones
"plot twist" of the love interest being a fae. be so serious with me rn
the princess gladiator stuff was off the fucking rails. I don't even know what to say
I feel like if all these princesses had been going missing all over the place over the course of centuries someone would've noticed?? I guess not??
absolutely no explanation as to why the evil fae was so obsessed with the MC. all inquiry met with "she's just so obsessive idk". It ended up being her dad's fault but he was almost never mentioned before in the book so it felt unearned as a plot twist. the evil fae also said she'd been collecting princesses for centuries though so I'm not even sure why that's presented as an evil backstory when this fae has apparently just always been this unhinged
character development? never met her
feels like so much plot happened and yet no plot at all. an insane number of people died during this book for no discernable reason, even major characters
I'll give some points for attempts at worldbuilding but even that fell way short of what I would've wanted to see. Lots of contradictions and not a lot of detail about the different countries and relationships between them
I guess I did have the energy to unpack it after all

editing to add: I just realized that this book is called To Wake a Kingdom. That title makes no sense bro everyone in the kingdom fucking died before they even got woken up
I'm gonna lose it

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