'To Kill a Kingdom' is a retelling of ‘The Little Mermaid.’ When I first started reading this book, it was so good! I thought ‘Wow, I guess the hype was worth it.’ But again YA literature strikes again with having the first 100 pages edited, and the rest just falls apart. I initially rated this after I finished it as 3 stars. I had thought that the book was merely fine. But now as I sit to write this review, I had to lower it to 2 stars because this book simply is not memorable. I do want to make it clear that I do think that Christo has the potential to be an amazing author. It’s all right there, her characters were developed, she had an adventure, action it was pretty much what you would expect of a The Little Mermaid retelling.

Where this book went wrong for me was that halfway through I didn’t believe the characters intentions. Lira is on a mission to get the Prince’s heart and give it to her mother the sea witch. When Lira is a siren, she is known as the Prince’s Bain. She hunts Prince’s down and steals there hearts for her mother. Which is cool in retrospect but my logical mind just thought of the irony of, ‘Wow there sure are a lot of Princes available for her to just steal hearts from.’ A little too convenient. The Prince was ok. I thought it was weird that he somehow is allowed to just sail around on his ship hunting sirens.

As the plot moves along her mother, the Sea Queen wants Lira to bring her a better heart. So she decides on the Prince/Pirate who also happens to be a Siren Hunter. He’s Pirate by day and Prince by night. Which again is fine. But it was just such a forced ‘enemies to lovers’ book. I did enjoy though that the Prince/Pirate wasn’t a total dumbass. It was refreshing to have a Prince/Pirate who was actually smart. There is more to the plot, but this book simply is not memorable. I can see why people really liked this book, but I think this author can do better than this.