A review by booksalacarte
A Reign of Rose by Kate Golden

adventurous dark emotional hopeful sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

Reign of Rose
3.75⭐️3🌶️

Third book
Dual POV
Fantasy Romance
Healer FMC
Magic
War
Dragons
Mythical beasts
Betrayal

Imprisonment, self harm, Death, War

The book picks up nicely a few weeks after the end of book 2. There is some time jumping at the beginning that I feel lessened the impact of the kidnapping/imprisonment. It did introduce new characters that I loved.

The pacing was decent, but there were definite lulls where it just felt like the same plotting from previous books. 

With how much plot happened off page, this should have been a multi pov book. Maintaining the dual pov and having side characters just show up with problem solving items/ideas/people in tow made it a bit too clean of a resolution to specific plot holes for my taste. 

There was a lot of action/fighting/war but at times it was hard to follow clearly. So much felt jumbled up, especially in the pov shifts.

I feel like sometimes the character choices were very abnormal. They serve the plot, but they’re not consistent with who the characters are in previous books. But then they would have a moment that was very lined up with the character development. 

I guess I don’t mind loose ends, if the Author admits that they are loose ends. It felt like a definite set up for expanding this series by at least 2 possible couples, but I don’t know if they would be compelling or high enough stakes after the villain of this story is defeated. I don’t think I would read further in this world.

Thank you NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for an eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

The Sacred Stones Series- 3.75⭐️3🌶️
A Dawn of Onyx- 4⭐️3🌶️
A Promise of Peridot-3.5⭐️3🌶️
Reign of Rose-4⭐️3🌶️
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