RITA Reader Challenge Review

The Leopard King by Ann Aguirre

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by cbackson. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Paranormal Romance category.

The summary:

Proud. Imperious. Impassioned.

Until three years ago, those words applied to Dominic Asher, the leader of Ash Valley. His family has ruled the feline branch of the Animari for hundreds of years, guiding the pride through perilous times. Unspeakable loss drove him into seclusion, a feral beast nobody can tame. Now he’s wrecked, a leopard king in exile, and he wants nothing more than to die.

Fierce. Loyal. Determined.

Fortunately for Dom, those words still apply to Pru Bristow, his dead mate’s best friend. She’s had her heart broken too, but she never quits. With the conclave approaching, alliances with the Pine Ridge pack and Burnt Amber clans on the verge of collapse, she’s prepared to do whatever it takes to drag their leader back, before his second can start a war.

At best theirs seems like a desperate alliance, but when their mate bond turns hot and fierce, there’s no end to the questions and the doubts. Neither of them expects to fall in love. But sometimes people don’t know what they’re looking for until they find it.

Here is cbackson's review:

So there was this time back in the day when I decided to get married, which was, in retrospect, pretty obviously a terrible idea. Not as terrible as the Japanese kanji tattoo my brother got when he was seventeen (note: we are not Japanese; further note: we do not speak Japanese; final note: he claimed it meant “lost soul,” riiiiiiight), but solidly worse than That Time I Did That Thing To My Hair, as well as harder to undo, since unlike a bad haircut, a bad marriage takes more than six months and a good hat selection to fix.

In any case, after my divorce, I went on a LOT of online dates, which became an endless source of hilarity to my co-workers, and I quickly learned that the hardest dates to talk about are the middling ones. A great date is pretty easy to talk about – he was smart and funny and we ended up in a Waffle House at 3 AM eating lemon pie because neither of us wanted to say good-bye! A terrible date is even easier, because the entertainment factor is so high – AND THEN HE TOLD ME A JOKE THAT COMPARED A WOMAN’S VAGINA TO THE TAUNTAUN CARCASS LUKE CRAWLED INSIDE ON HOTH.*

But then there are the times you go to a restaurant with small plates and a specialty cocktail menu and you wear your nice jeans and your going-out top and spend the night talking to a perfectly polite guy named Stuart who’s a software developer with a dog and who is spiritual but not religious and enjoys cooking, hiking, and travel and talks kind of a lot about how much he likes college basketball, which is objectively fine but in context kind of super-boring after a while, and nothing’s terrible about it, but man, nothing’s great either and by the time you get in your car, you remember the gorgonzola-stuffed dates a lot better than you remember Stuart. And the next day when your co-workers ask how it went all you can really say was “Eh. It was fine.”

Reader, grand passion never grew out of a date that was “fine.”

Unfortunately, reading The Leopard King was a lot like going on a date with Stuart. I was excited for the concept: the hero, Dominic, is the alpha of a bunch of cat shifters. He was widowed and so he retreated to his mountain chalet for a bunch of years to brood sexily, and the shifters couldn’t replace him with someone functional because Reasons, so his BFF and his dead mate’s BFF have been getting shit done while he does…whatever he does all day. Pru is the dead mate’s BFF, and although she is apparently super nice and sweet and compassionate and supportive and beautiful, she can’t turn into an animal so everyone but her parents views her as expendable. She has been in love with Broody Dominic’s BFF, Slay, for ever, but because she can’t shift, she isn’t good enough for him, so he has sex with her but won’t marry her.

Let’s just pause there because the fact that BFF’s name is SLAY is pretty much the best thing about this book. I really wish that this book was actually about Slay and that Slay was a cat shifter who was also a tortured 1980s rocker, like Axl Rose but furry. Seriously, I would read the HELL out of a book in which Guns N Roses were cat shifters.

Sadly, this wasn’t that book.

Anyway, there is some kind of threat relating to the other various supernatural races and eventually someone decides that maybe somebody has to go fetch Broody Dom down from his Fortress of Solitude, and Pru is dispatched because if he’s out of his gourd crazy and kills her it’ll be NBD since she can’t shift. But instead Broody Dom decides that despite him knowing her for her entire life he never realized that she was totally hot and he wants to have sex with her, and then she basically agrees to be his new mate to get him to come down from the mountain.

I’m not a big fan of standard shifter books, but I am interested by second-chance romance and friends to lovers stories- particularly when the former spouse isn’t vilified and the importance of the original relationship is recognized. But I just didn’t buy the connection here. First, although Dom, Slay, and Dead Mate Darlena apparently grew up together, Dom hardly knows anything about Pru at all. The lack of a sense of a shared backstory sapped the story of its potential emotional weight. The friends to lovers concept and dynamic is missing – which seems even odder given that this is portrayed as a small, tight-knit community.

In addition, it’s not clear at all why Pru’s promise to become Dom’s mate needs to be kept. Once they get down the mountain, he plunges right back into taking charge and being a leader and all that, and while it’s nice that Pru got him to come down, I didn’t buy that something lasting was forged between them. I didn’t buy that her emotional relationship with Slay was over (and in fact, the Slay/Pru relationship felt significantly more emotionally significant, even after they come back down the mountain, than her connection to Dom). I think that we are supposed to be of the impression that her promise to be his mate is binding in some way that ties them notwithstanding her misgivings, but the worldbuilding is so poorly done that it isn’t at all clear why.

A note on that, by the way – I’m fine with authors taking a light hand with worldbuilding. I don’t need six-page tables of characters and glossaries and pronunciation guides for invented languages and hand-drawn maps of the Realms of Middle-Earth. But the world needs to be coherent. It needs to feel like it was done with care. And this doesn’t. For example, one of the other magical races is called “the Golgoth.” Which is one letter off from “Golgotha,” the hill on which Jesus was crucified. I twisted myself into knots trying to figure out what the story was doing with the crucifixion allusion, until I realized that it wasn’t doing anything. There wasn’t any significance to the similarity. It felt sloppy. Like naming a villain “Darth Vaiden” but not meaning anything by it.

Finally, as I mentioned above, I’m a bit of a shifter skeptic. I’ve loved some books with shapeshifters in them – Ilona Andrews’ Kate Daniels books are among my favorite romances, and I love Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series. But to draw me in, a shifter book has to make me believe that the characters are both fully human, and fully animal. A character that is also an animal isn’t going to have standard human reactions or a standard human view of the world. A great example from the Mercy Thompson series is the relationship between Samuel and Adam. They’re both, individually, kind, good men, and they respect each other, but at the same time, it’s incredibly hard for them to be in the same room together, because they’re both alpha wolves, and a pack can’t have two alphas. The book needs to depict convincing human behavior and convincing animal behavior. Unfortunately, I just didn’t believe that any of the characters in The Leopard Prince had an animal under the skin.

One thing I’ve learned from my many years of online dating is that there are too many good men in the world to go out on a second date with someone who bores you. The same is true with books. Like Stuart, after about two hours I knew with certainty that I was never going to care about Pru and Dom and their relationship. And so, The Leopard King joined Stuart in the great DNF pile of my life.

*True story.

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The Leopard King by Ann Aguirre

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Add Your Comment →

  1. harthad says:

    The best thing about these terrible books is that they inspire such fabulous reviews. You win the Silver Lining award today!

  2. marjorie says:

    Oh my LORD this was a delight to read. (HOTH.) Where else do you blog, cbackson? I wanna read more of your reviews!!

  3. Berry says:

    This may be my favorite Rita review so far.

  4. Gigi says:

    This review was a joy to read unlike The Leopard King, which I actually finished. It got even more awful and inexplicable as it went on so you definitely did yourself a favor. The cover is pretty though.

  5. I read the review with entertainment and interest, because the book totally worked for me. I loved it. I loved the worldbuilding with the solid underpinnings, I loved the quietly competent heroine and her wounded hero, I loved the political intrigue and the (to me) emotionally satisfying romance.

    But I really loved this review also. 😀

  6. Ren Benton says:

    Further on, the relationship became even more “What relationship?” as the focus shifted to 99% political intrigue and war. I think there was some “I can’t believe they’re having sex NOW” sex in the midst of that, but their relationship development, such as it was, was done by the time they came down from the mountain.

  7. Gloriamarie says:

    While the review made me laugh out loud frequently, I’ll just mention that I read this book back in October, according to my records and gave it a B, which means I enjoyed it. I love shifter stories, I love damaged heroes. I love second-chance stories.

    I would have offered to review it but by the time I ever saw the sign-up sheet, it was full.

  8. Kareni says:

    I enjoyed reading both of today’s reviews on this book. My thoughts ~ I enjoyed with some reservations. I’ll definitely continue on with subsequent books in the series, but there were aspects of the book that I found jarring. The reader is informed that humans exist in this world, but that they’re distant (due to a treaty?). IEDs are jarring but reasonable (trading?). The use of cell phones however would seem to indicate a need for cell towers ….

  9. Vivi12 says:

    I tried this book too, both because I LOVED Grimspace, and because I’m always looking for a shifter book I like as much as the Mercy Thompson series. I did finish but totally concur with your review.

  10. Your writing is fabulous. (Hoth, as mentioned above. And Stuart. And “Darth Vaiden.”) The book may have been a DNF for you, but the review was an A for me.

  11. Heather T says:

    Wonderful review. Stuart. Hoth. All the laughs!

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