Once Upon a Bibliophile

BOOKS- Captain of Fates and King of Beasts

AUTHORS- Katherine Webber and Catherine Doyle

GENRE- Romance, Fantasy

RATING- 3.5/5

I have to admit, I didn’t have the highest expectations for these Twin Crowns spin offs. In my experience, novels like these are never as good as the original- and I’m sure many of you will agree.

In fairness to the authors, I don’t think any Eana novels they could write would ever live up to Twin Crowns. It wouldn’t be fair to compare Captain of Fates and King of Beasts to the original trilogy.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

CAPTAIN OF FATES (Katherine Webber)

Plot

I’ll admit it now- this wasn’t my favorite of the two. Any liking I have for Marino as a character was completely overshadowed by the sheer predictability of the actual plot.

I’m aware that Captain of Fates was intended to be a story focused on character development rather than the action packed plots of the previous trilogy. But personally, I felt like there was just a little too much going on. It was almost like there were two separate plots, and I didn’t feel compelled to read on by either of them.

The premise is this- Celeste has fallen ill with the mysterious Seeing Sickness and Marino, who believes he is to blame, sets sail on a desperate quest to find the cure. His adventures will lead him to the isle of Solvora, a place guarded by mer and ruled by past mistakes.

There he meets Lana, a beautiful baker who longs to escape the island, and Kira, a mermaid trapped by her people’s cruelty. Both yearn for freedom, and both steal his heart. But with time running out to find the cure and Solvora on the brink of a human/mer war, Marino will have to make the hardest choice of all: his home, or his heart?

As I said earlier, I didn’t have very high expectations for this. I was mostly afraid that Captain of Fates would do what a lot of fantasy spinoffs do and reveal something that changes the whole perspective-and sometimes the world- of the original books. I’m glad to say that Captain of Fates didn’t do this. Once you got past the inevitable recap-infodump bit at the start where the entire original story is condensed down into a page at most, it wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it was going to be.

One thing that helped with this is that it wasn’t based in Eana. It would’ve been so easy for the author to make Marino’s story a feeble imitation of Twin Crowns, or a tale of a discovery that made no sense to the original world. Instead, it started in Eana and traveled outwards, exploring more of the original world past the boundaries of the Twin Crowns map. I liked the addition of the mer- it tied back to Marino’s original story and it actually made sense.

But once you get past first impressions, the plot itself didn’t really live up to what it promised to be. I think I would have liked it better if it was simpler. There was just too much going on. I know I’ve said this before, but it’s true. The plot at the start about Celeste got forgotten in all the confusion about the mer. It felt almost like two seperate books that didn’t belong together had been melded into one- and they hadn’t properly joined.

And on top of this, I knew what was going to happen at the end. I think that was the basis of why this book only got 3.5 stars from me. All that with Kiralana and the mer, I could tell it was coming from a mile away.

However, all this said, I did enjoy revisiting Eana, and reading Katherine Webber is always a treat. Unfortunately, the plot of this particular book just let it down a bit.

Characters

I’m happy to say that the characters of Captain of Fates were a bit more likable than the story.

MARINO

In Twin Crowns, Marino was a pretty static character. In fact, he wasn’t really much of anything apart from a way for the twins to get to and from Gevra. He was a man who owned a ship and happened to be Celeste’s brother. In Captain of Fates, he’s a very different character. CoF Marino is an actual person. He’s got faults and strengths and goals. Marino is everything you would expect from a romantasy captain- swashbuckling, charming, brave. Ok, so maybe he’s a bit cliche, but he’s still an extremely likable character. And I did like him, despite the reckless personality that sometimes gets on my nerves. Equally, Marino also grew as a character during the book too. At the beginning, he was independent, but in an arrogant kind of way. He believed that all he needed in his life was his ship and the sea, and he had this misguided sense of ‘I don’t need love’. The character arc he had during CoF tied back to the themes of family, friendship and love from Twin Crowns as Marino discovered the importance of letting people in.

KIRA

Kira got on my nerves. It’s as simple as that really. She was irritatingly superior all the time. In fact, everything about her was irritating. Her whole story line was giving major ‘The Little Mermaid’ vibes, yet she acted like helping Marino wasn’t something she wanted to do. I had no idea what her real motivations were, and this annoyed me. Kira portrayed herself to the world like she was some kind of monster, and the power she had over Marino just escalated this, yet she did all these kind things. She is a very confusing person mermaid.

LANA

I quite liked Lana. And…yeah. Not much else to say about her. Being completely honest, I thought she was a pretty average character. It’s not that I dislike Lana. I just found her a bit…boring? I’d seen her so many times before in other books, that’s all.

One thing that I really do like about the characters in any of the Twin Crows novels is that they’re actually good people, without falling back too much onto tired ‘hero’ tropes. Too much now we see the same perfect book boyfriends and ‘sassy’ female leads in fantasy and romantasy. It felt really great to be reading a book that didn’t rely on just these booktok cliches to write a good novel. So though I mentioned that I felt like I’d seen Lana too many times before in other books, at least I wasn’t seeing yet another Powerless Paedyn. And for this I’m grateful.

And so, overall, though I found the characters much better than the plot, they weren’t the best I’ve come across, but-falling back on one of my main principles when reviewing- they weren’t the worst. ¹

KING OF BEASTS (Catherine Doyle)

Plot

Just before we begin, I want to say that Alarik was -and still is- one of my all time favorite Twin Crowns characters. I was soooo excited to find King of Beasts in my library because I just adore Alarik. Not in a weird way though.

Returning to Gevra felt great, even better than returning to Eana. But, unfortunately, what Captain of Fates thankfully avoided, King of Beasts fell straight into the trap of. I will elaborate, but for now I just want to be mysterious.

Again, King of Beasts has a deceptively simple premise. King Alarik Felsing is a lone wolf (I didn’t write this, it is genuinely on the back of the book), accustomed to his loyal subjects obeying his every command. But then a spirited and talented young wrangler arrives to tame the king’s army of beasts. And Greta Iversen (yes, Tor’s sister) does not bend to Alarik’s will.

The king and his wrangler are drawn together both by the wildness in their hearts and the beasts they adore. But with the snow-swept kingdom of Gevra teetering on the brink of war and an ancient creature stirring in the mountains, it seems the world is determined to keep them apart.

Sounds fun doesn’t it?

Remember what I was saying earlier about fantasy spinoffs sometimes revealing things that don’t make sense to the original world? This is what happened in King of Beasts. I won’t say what happened, on the off chance that one of you might get the book after reading this simply glowing review, but it really made me stop and go what?

As in, why didn’t this happen earlier? and how come we never know about this before? levels of what. And as the what levels increased, I found myself enjoying the book less and less.

It wasn’t anything to do with the plot in the sense of the action or the conflict. It was more about the world. Like, I understand that Gevra obviously has more to it than is revealed in Twin Crowns. But the discovery that Alarik and Greta made just changed the entire concept of the ‘old’ Gevra quite a lot. I can’t really say much more without completely spoiling the entire book, but it really annoyed me.

And that kind of ruined the whole plot for me.

And not only this, but I found King of Beasts quite predictable too. Once I got an idea of what was going on, I found myself being very unsuprised by the plot twists. Which sort of defeats the purpose of plot twists, doesn’t it?

Characters

Like with Captain of Fates, the characters in KoB delivered a little more than the plot.

ALARIK

I loved Alarik in this book. Similarly to Marino, in Twin Crowns he was quite a static character, and was portrayed as this vicious, arrogant king. Now, he’s growing a lot more into the character he was revealed to be in Cursed Crowns. Though Alarik’s ‘soft side’ is quite tropey, I think it was done very well – unlike some books I’ve read. I don’t think that Alarik was really written as a comedic character, but I always find him funny. I think it might be the grumpiness. Just the image of him stomping around Grinstad Palace makes me smile, and I liked how Alarik showed that characters with the ‘soft side’ trope don’t have to be all fluff.

GRETA

Greta is another one of those characters where I’ve seen them a lot before, but would rather them than a Paedyn. Her reckless nature did kind of get on my nerves, and I did not enjoy the second hand embarrassment I got from lots of her scenes, but she was quite a good character. However, I did notice one thing about Greta. At the beginning of the book, it was kind of implied that she had some kind of mental health issue- but it wasn’t said on page so this might just be me. I was really glad to see a character like this in fantasy, but it never really got any follow through. There was a bit of talking between her and another character about an event in her childhood that might have been the cause of undiagnosed PTSD, but that was it. I was pretty disappointed that this aspect of her personality didn’t get any real follow through, because it’s really rare that I come across a character that has mental health issues- or even a fantasy book that discusses this theme very well.

However, though I would have liked for Greta to have more depth to some parts of her character, I thought that the characters in King of Beasts were very well done overall.

One thing I liked a lot about it was the side characters. I felt as though in CoF there weren’t very many of these, but KoB really brought it. Not only did they provide depth to the story, many acted to highlight parts of the main characters personalities in a really subtle way – not quite foils, but close. I thought this was really well done, and I enjoyed watching the relationships between the leads and the sides grow with the story.

CONCLUSION

I did enjoy re-visiting Eana, and especially enjoyed diving deeper into some of the characters that maybe got overshadowed by the twins in the original books. However, though they were good books, I can’t really see myself reading them again, let alone buying them to add to my Twin Crowns collection. Though I did like the characters, the plots were predictable at best. But don’t let this take anything away from the magic of Twin Crowns. Though I value each author as individuals, it’s safe to say that they’re stronger together. Which seems fitting, considering the main theme of Twin Crowns.

1. I really have to stop saying that. I’ve used it so much that I don’t even know who the worst characters are any more ↩︎