Princess of Tyrone was a sci-fi version of Sleeping Beauty and I thought it was SUCH a cool idea! I really loved the concept and the idea proposed, but everything else fell short.
I didn’t like anything else about it.
It’s a real shame that I didn’t like this book, and there were far too many reasons.
- This story felt more like a fantasy to me than a sci-fi, I really didn’t get the vibe that we were in the future until things like ‘space pirates’ and ‘other planets’ were mentioned. I don’t think the sci-fi aspect was even needed, it could’ve been taken out completely and it wouldn’t have made a difference to the story.
- The story opens with graphic scenes of Apolline butchering magical animals to take the meat to the store and sell it to them. Ironically I thought this was written far better than the rest of the book, but I couldn’t figure out why certain points were needed to be written with such graphic detail. Especially since the rest of the book wasn’t written with the same detail. It was already clear that Apolline wasn’t an ordinary princess.
- It was trying to be too many things at once and therefore didn’t excel in any of it. It was a fairytale retelling, had fantasy lands with a magic system and magical beings, a romance, and a sci-fi with interstellar travel. All of it was lacking and it was executed badly.
- There was too much going on in the backstory and this was all delivered as long info-dumps. I just couldn’t remember it all and it felt like I was reading a textbook rather than a story. Like how the fairies and magic worked and what their purpose was, the history of the kingdoms and planets, other characters… I started to feel lost when the other fairytale characters were mentioned because I couldn’t remember why they were important and what part they had played in history before this story began. The issue was that there were important things mentioned but it was presented poorly.
- I know this is a retelling of a story but there was nothing that made this retelling stand out. I was bored often because all I was reading was encounter after encounter of Apolline and Allard. I was hoping for more of a story, but it just didn’t have one.
- The writing was clunky and… bad. In some places characters were saying things simply so the reader received the information, the names of the characters sounded like made up words and didn’t roll off of the tongue, and the characters talked far too much for no reason. It was hard to read all of the dialogue that didn’t propel the story forward. I really felt like whole scenes could have been cut and replaced with one line.
- The story was far longer than it should’ve been, it could’ve ended at 75%. There were multiple other times I thought the story should’ve ended because it felt like the characters had already gotten what they wanted. Reading right to the end of the book was a real struggle.
I think this concept had a lot of potential but unfortunately it was executed very poorly. It felt like a draft rather than a finished book.