A review by missawn
The Marked Prince by M.A. Grant

2.0

I am surprised by my reaction to this book. I adored [b:Prince of Air and Darkness|41550787|Prince of Air and Darkness (The Darkest Court, #1)|M.A. Grant|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543531041l/41550787._SY75_.jpg|64825586]. I absolutely loved the tempestuous chemistry and intriguing world-building. It was not a perfect book but there was enough there for me to really, really like it and to get quite excited about moving on to this book.

This book made little sense to me (of particular note was the persistent mask and secret identities -- which just felt weird). I struggled with the MCs and found that while the first book had buckets of chemistry, this one had virtually none. We first meet both MCs in the first book of this series -- I found Seb quite bland/boring in that book -- in this book he gets a brand new personality transplant as a royal-being of extraordinary ability (which was a little silly actually) and then goes on to be one of those saintly/martyr-like characters that I'm not a fan of at all. There was also cruelty in this book that was hard to reconcile without yet another personality transplant and a lot of martyring of characters via. guilt. There were also a lot of characters to keep track of -- none of which were particularly engaging and their motivations often unclear.

It just did not work for me and I found myself quite disengaged from the whole story -- and it took me a while to get through it. Still, I really enjoy this author's writing and consider [b:Prince of Air and Darkness|41550787|Prince of Air and Darkness (The Darkest Court, #1)|M.A. Grant|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543531041l/41550787._SY75_.jpg|64825586] to be one of my favourite reads of the summer! The high point of this book is definitely the reappearance of Roark and Phin!

Not my favourite book of the series but I intend to continue on -- and look forward to the next book ...