I was torn between a 3 and 4 star rating on this. It’s certainly a fast-paced read, I got through it in just a couple sittings, but some of the reveals were pretty obvious and the villain didn’t really have any teeth—the motive lacked clarity and depth, same for character development. In the end, the flatness of characters coupled with the predictability pushed this down to a 3 — it was fine but I’m not feeling the urge to continue with the series. Maybe when I start running out of things I’m excited to read I’ll come back. Luckily, the book can easily function as a stand-alone.

This was a great bonus story for the Expanse Universe. It's not necessary to understand the main series, but it adds some depth to the universe, giving us the backstory on Solomon Epstein, inventor of the revolutionary Epstein drive.

Let's look at the positives first: I really like how the magic is illustrated. That is easily my favorite part of these graphic novels. It's kind of a visual blend of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Doctor Strange. Very cool.
Now on to the rest.
I think I'm not as impressed with the Steel Prince stories because they're...hollow. They're based off a throwaway line in the original novels about why the king is so renowned and to me it's pretty evident. In the first volume you had the pirate queen: damn near impossible to beat, quite formidable.

Maxim goes in and defeats her within a couple days of her showing up. Granted, he had some help but seriously? He's an untested, arrogant, overconfident prince and he easily defeats the pirate queen, who can literally control your skeleton.

Now we have the Night of Knives, which is this dangerous, unbeatable trial that has killed oodles of people. And there's a bit about a gang attacking soldiers, whose ringleader shows up throughout the volume to harass Maxim, but they don't really feel relevant to the story being told.

Again, Maxim goes in and pretty easily defeats the first 3 trials and then with some help from the royal guards, he chases off an Antari magician. Except I'm pretty sure the Antari could have quite easily crushed him like a bug. Also, the part where Maxim will pay people to hand over Antari magicians but then has the audacity to be like "No, I just want you to help me. Why are you so mad bro?" when one of those magicians is pissed about the idea that this prince thinks he can buy people and use them for his own purposes, is kinda gross. Maybe that was intentional but I dunno. It certainly seems like this is how Kell ended up with the royal family later on, so apparently Maxim didn't take Rowan's perception on the whole idea to heart.

Also, I just don't care about Maxim as a character. At all.