Abigail Owen

The Liar's Crown

Aishling

The liar’s curse is a book with a premise that initially peak my interested, but unfortunately the execution didn’t live up to it. Two story is about twin girls who are born to the royal family, but only one of them will be announced publicly while the other will live her life in hiding and only appear when she needs to step in for her twin in times of danger. Tabra was the first born of the two meaning she got the role of the princess, while Meren the second born became her body double. 

One day Meren gets the news that the current Queen, her grandmother, has died which means it’s time for Tabra to take the role of the queen. Meren must then go to live with her sister in secret and be always prepared to step in for her. 

Just before the coronation, Tabra receives a gift from King Eidolon, the ruler of a nearby kingdom and the man the girls grandmother had always warned them about. Tabra decides she wants to meet with the king but Meren insisters on going instead of her. So on the day of the coronation, Meren pretends to be Tabra and goes to meet the king only to be kidnapped on the way. Thus begins the central plot of the book.

The reason this book didn’t work for me was the overused cliches/tropes. Meren is identical to her sister, but doesn’t think she’s as pretty as her. She refuse to acknowledge her looks, even going as far as to say her lips are “too full”. I’m very sick of female protagonists describing widely desired features in a bad way. 

Then there Reven, the mysterious boy Meren meets for a minute at the start of the book and then comes her kidnapper. Reven is part of why I was interested in reading this story as the way he controls shadows sounded so interesting. But the way Meren thinks about him annoyed me too much. When she first sets eyes on him she immediately feels a connection to him. He said a whole of three words to her, “who are you?” before he disappears, and suddenly she can only think of him when she receives a love confession from someone else. Later when he shows up to kidnap her, Meren suddenly knows just by looking into his eyes that he “can see the real me”, and that “he… wants me?”. How she surmises all of this just from looking at his face, I have no idea. What follows is Meren constantly saying she hates Reven, when her thoughts and actions say otherwise. It felt more like denial than actual enemies to lovers. 


If there was a bit more originality to Meren’s thinking, and she was like the typical YA protagonist then I might have enjoyed this more, but unfortunately these are things I really can’t stand in books and didn’t make this an enjoyable read.