The Castle of Kings: A Novel

This book was slow moving, not very engaging, and lacking the complexity you should reasonably expect out of a 665 page book. It had YA style plot elements complete with holes large enough to drive trucks through. This might be explained by the need to come up with a plot that fit the occurrences in history the author wanted to cover, but I cannot excuse him for it. In general this felt like a YA caliber book or fan fiction. It is touted as something akin to Princess Bride, Lord of the Rings, or Pillars of the Earth...my caveat here would be that those were good. The stories were engaging; you cared what happened to the characters. I found that these characters lacked depth and emotional presence and the only thing I wanted for them to do was stop shrieking each other’s names at in-opportune times. Agnes was supposed to be a heroine. She was terribly unfortunate, but not terribly heroic. The author's vocabulary is questionable with nonsense words thrown in and clunky descriptors here and there that could have been handled with more finesse.

No

When the bird took the lance at the end because I knew it had to be almost over.

Grudging determination to slog through it.

I'm almost finished this book, and I was sucked in at the beginning--I couldn't wait to listen to the next chapter! However, as the book goes on it gets quite dull, and the characters get very mundane. One big pet peeve I have so far with this book is Agnes and M--they're very immature and their "arguments" drive me insane. It's starting to feel like the characters were written by a thirteen year old who has never experienced a real relationship with real arguments.

I'm unsure at this point.

Not really. In fact, I have been wondering if I might have enjoyed the story more if I had simply read it, instead of listening to it. Ms Reading does not do that well of a job with this reading--either the characters sound too whiny or too similar; I'm not sure how to explain it but the reading makes the characters feel like they're lacking even more depth and growth.

It's an OK story--not grand, not memorable, just OK.

An editor who would have pruned this book to address its painful plodding pace, repetitiveness, whining one-dimensional characters, lack of action...to the point where u don't really care what happens to any of these characters even though you've already spent 10 hours listening to this...

no...i generally love historical fiction, but this was just awful...

sooo annoying...i listen to audiobooks while i commute...some books are so compelling that u want to hear every word and even when you finally pull into your driveway at home, you still sit there for a few minutes to hear the next part of the story...but The Castle of Kings is NOT that kind of book...in fact it was soo bad that the narrator's tone (and the content of the novel itself) would result in my drifting off repeatedly and having to rewind to listen to what i had missed (which btw wasn't much)...

NONE...ABSOLUTELY NONE...character development and plot was sophomoric and one-dimensional at best...narration was annoying...struggled to get thru the majority of this audiobook...would NOT recommend this to anyone...

wish i could get my money back on this...but hopefully my review will prevent someone from wasting one of their credits on this book...

Set in the Palatinate of 1520s, this Historical Fuction novel propels our Heroine, Agnes, theough many adventures as she seeks to understand her dreams and the mysterious signet ring she has found. Intertwined with her story is that of the local blacksmiths son Mathis (pron Matese), her childhood friend and love deapite her high birth and his low. Theoughout the story we see through their eyes the devastation of the real war of the time and it felt strangly timely as it was the.peasants risng up to wrest control from the nobels There us a degree of the fantastic here... Some remarkable events and luck but nothing of fantasy. I really enjoyed this novel and the unabridged audible presentation

Poor plot, just too conveniently depending on dreams to more the story along. Did not like the narration either. I have listened almost all of the authors previous works but this was particularly disappointing.

Almost as good as the Hangman's Daughter series. Worth one credit and a bit more.

This book portrays black people as devils and never developed the black character or gave him a true voice. Sad.