Antonia Bernardin

My 31st read of the year was Slaying the Vampire Conqueror by Carissa Broadbent, book 2.5 in the Crowns of Nyaxia series.

You can read my review of:

Book 1 here: Serpent and the Wings of Night

Book 1.5 here: Six Scorched Roses

Book 2 here: The Ashes and the Star cursed King

Book 3 here: The Songbird and the Heart of Stone

Maybe it’s time I make a compilation post for this series huh?

Summary attempt

Sylina is an orphaned street kid turned trained assassin in service of the Goddess of fate. This order requires so much devotion that they eyes are taken, so that their senses can be opened to the Threads. Unlike the other acolytes Sylina joined the order at a much older age and that means she knew a life outside of the Salt Keep. Her city was invaded and she escaped the War and took refuge at the keep, so she owes them, her Goddess and The Sight Mother everything but she’s never been quite able to let go of the anger left in her after the war. When their country is invaded by a vampire conqueror, The Sight Mother decides that this fire left in Sylina makes her the perfect candidate to go undercover in his army acting as his Seer and pretending to be on the run from the order as a dissident.

She successfully infiltrates the army and as she looks for Atrius’s weakness’s, she is shocked to receive orders to not use her seer gifts to slow down or prevent his gradual invasion of Glaea. She is to focus on the mission of his death and nothing else. With her past, this doesn’t quite sit right with Sylina and, as she grows closer to Atrius, seeing how he operates and understanding the plight of his people, she begins to question everything.

My thoughts

So, it’s been a minute since I read books 2 and 3 but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how this ties into the overall narrative. For 1.5 I understood the context but there’s so many houses, so many nations mentioned in the course of this series, I honestly couldn’t have told you how this ties into the main story.

This book is genuinely enemies to lovers in a way that begins slow burn but heats up pretty quickly. Their relationship progress was really well written and I liked that the main character is a badass and that the male MC recognises that throughout. However, I didn’t enjoy this as much as other books in the series but I can’t really pinpoint why… it just felt quite slow? It’s a lot of battle followed by time in a camp followed by a battle and so on. I thought the ending was pretty satisfying and I’m starting to see this picture the author is building of how everything that has happened in the overall series is related to the machinations and feuds of the Gods- it all feels very reminiscent of the stories of the Greek Gods, except these are the stories in action.

I think you could read this totally stand-alone without reading book 2 and it wouldn’t spoil anything. I also don’t think you need to read this to understand the events in book 3. My main grumble is that these authors are really starting to make us work for it with these ‘.5’ books that are literally a whole lengthly novel on their own!

Buy a copy for yourself from Amazon*

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