Review: The Reluctant King

The Reluctant King by Rachel Higginson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I put off reading this book for a long time. I loved the first 4 star-crossed books and was really happy with the HEA we got for Eden. I guess I was concerned that reading this book would stir everything up again and have me worrying about the characters I think deserve some down time.

This book picks up years after the end of the previous book. Avalon has been ruling alone for a while because his sister and her husband took a really really long honeymoon (good call, Eden). He's bored and restless and generally doesn't want to be king (like the title, see?). He fell into the typical trap where he starts internally mocking all the couples in love. This usually spells disaster. Enter Amelia -- a girl who has had a crush on Avalon for quite some time, but has also been overlooked by him in the past. Of course, now Avalon see her and now she's reluctant (ha) to get involved with him.

After some kind of confusing reasoning for constantly pushing him away, there are some truly wonderful moments between the two of them. It made me feel like I was reading one of the previous books. Lots of YA kissing and sigh worthy moments. Unfortunately, this book begins a larger story arc that I didn't want to see -- there's a new big bad out there and he's doing really horrible things. Nobody in this book gets a real happy ending and it was kind of... a bummer. I didn't really understand Amelia's motivations and I kind of thought Avalon was mostly being a cocky jerk. I wish we had more insight into Amelia as a character, especially since it appears she will play a big role in the upcoming war/fight/rebellion thing.

I'm hoping that the next story (Jericho's) will restore my faith in happy endings for this series. Don't get me wrong -- I know that sometimes you can't get one, but after such a nice wrap up in book 4 I got kind of spoiled.



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