Book Review: Falling Kingdoms (Falling Kingdoms #1)

Falling Kingdoms
Morgan Rhodes
3/5

Falling Kingdoms was super exciting and interesting the whole way through. It's through the eyes of Cleo, Magnus, Jonas, and Lucia, teenagers who have suddenly become very involved in the war between their kingdoms. They all have their strengths, politically, mentally, physically, and magically. If you like books that have court intrigue with magical elements, this has it all.

The three kingdoms, Paelsia, Limeros, and Auranos, have stark differences in wealth. This becomes exceedingly obvious when a peasant from Paelsia is murdered by an Auranos noble while haggling over prices that the Auranos noble could obviously pay. After that, there's a bunch of building tension and political maneuvering in attempts by Paelsia and Limeros to take the wealthier Auranos. I liked the war scenes, the idea of the rich taking advantage of the poor and the poor getting sick of it. The idea of three kingdoms who used to be one having such stark differences.

I had problems with the general convenience of it. A lot of it felt so just blatantly spoken, like things were being said instead of shown. Like Magnus has been abused, let's use these situation directly and have it all be described through clunky flashbacks. The prologue gave away what could have been a cooler plot twist, but like instead it felt like Rhodes was trying to justify Magnus's creepy thoughts towards his sister. (Did not like that and I'm glad that it got shut down, even if you aren't related by blood like why do you feel that way I don't understand).

(Slight spoilers) The deaths also didn't strike me as much of plot twists, just obligatory in order to push the characters towards each other. Theon's whole arc was so random, I never really cared if he lived or died and I didn't feel the authenticity of his love story with Cleo. I couldn't handle the line where he was like "you should fall in love with someone" and then like forty pages later "he thinks he's in love with her" (I read mostly on the bus and didn't take notes). Obligatory, a character motivator for Cleo's arc and not really a great way of doing so.

This one didn't have me shook or screaming, more like I was reading the prologue or their backstories. I'm still super excited to read the next book, this one was too short to get into all of the different characters listed. I want to like Magnus and Jonas, but I'm skeptical that I will, I don't know how you can come back from how I felt about their actions in this one. I loved Cleo, and though we didn't see enough of Lucia, I'm thinking she's also going to be a great character. This one was definitely a three star read, but still a great set-up to the rest of the series.