Review: Crush the King (Crown of Shards Series Book 3) by Jennifer Estep

Crush the King by Jennifer Estep
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Some Loose Ends

I’d probably give this book 4.5 ⭐️ if I could.

This is the third book in the series and you need to read the first two books in order to understand this one. The narrative appears to end with the conclusion of this book, but it’s been left open for future adventures.

This book is about the Regalia, an international competition for physical, mental and magical abilities. Each country enters their own top competitors in each category and then they all compete for the top slot. The Regalia is held every three years on Fortuna Island, which is an independent port/trading post/banking centre. Fortuna Island is home to the DiLucis who are the ruling family and are so wealthy they behave like royalty. They seem to be up to no good in relation to Everleigh and no one can work out why.

The Regalia give Everleigh the opportunity to finally meet the Mortan king face to face for the first time. With all the royal families on the continent together since taking power, Everleigh plans to use the opportunity to make some alliances and to cause Morta some problems, of the terminal variety.

One thing I really liked about this book was the Everleigh employed multiple avenues of attack. She had several ways to try and accomplish her goals because she knew that not all of them would work. She utilised the skills she learnt from her warrior training and Lady Xenia’s spy/political training and mashed them together to come up with some unique options that might not be obvious initially.

I felt a bit sorry for Sully in this book because he went from being a major part of the story to being basically backup for Everleigh. All he really did was comfort her and play guard, when he’s a really powerful magician and swordsman in his own right, not to mention he grew up in his father’s court, so he should have been a really valuable resource and he wasn’t given much to do or consulted much at all. It seemed like his role was to basically hug and kiss Everleigh and tell her she was wonderful. It felt like once he became her consort the relationship became unimportant to the story except as background filler.

This book was all about the plot and there was so much less about the emotional aspect of the characters. It felt like a run to the finish line to get everything accomplished by the end of the book. It left a lot of loose ends, that I really hope get resolved in a future book, but I don’t know if that is planned or not. I know there is a spin-off series about Gemma, set 15 years after the end of this book, but I don’t know if there is going to be anything else in this timeline, and if there isn’t that will be a shame.

So whilst I enjoyed the political, magical and physical plotlines, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as the previous ones, which is a shame because they were exceptionally good books. This was just a good one. However, if another book came out in this series, I would probably snap it up because I want to know how all those loose ends tie up!

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