Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is the story of Damen, a Prince overthrown by his half-brother upon the event of his death and given as a sex slave to the crown prince of a rival nation (Damen's identity as the "dead" prince is not known to his new owner). *** TW: This book contains assault, rape, and child sexual assault. My biggest issue with the plot overall was that while the concept does sound interesting enough, the execution is the worst I've ever come across. Damen is a vague character at best and no matter what he goes through (an assault, an attempted assault, and another assault), his character never changes. Ever. He's assaulted one day by a servant to prepare him for the prince who owns him, nearly assaulted in a public "sport", and the next day he's all ready for the servant who assaulted him the first time to give him a massage without any worry. On top of that, he meets and sort of befriends a slave from his home country who apparently had been held captive and groomed for his own use (the slave was sent to the rival country upon his supposed death). Yet when he sees this slave brutalized by a rival his only thoughts are that the slave was groomed for *him*, so *he* should be the only one using him. And that's meant to help display his supposed growth because hey- he spoke to him in the first place! Oh, and it is fine that Damen kept slaves, because they were too "weak willed" to know how to spend their time or live their lives, so they ~needed~ someone to own them, they are like children and helpless without a master. That isn't presented as a skewed world view, it's presented as absolutely correct and A-OK. Even to the person forced to be a slave and the one being brutalized. Women in this series also fall under 1 of 2 categories: easy, or easy and pregnant. Honestly the base, 1 sentence summary of this book sounds like a decent enough premise. It's the writing that is just aggressively awful. C.S. Pacat, I am willing to say, is a terrible writer without a drop of talent for storytelling. This first book was self-published and it shows with all the hallmarks any decent editor would have gotten rid of (pointed out above largely). This would not even pass in a junior high english class, let alone as an actual book. Character descriptions are sketchy, the most bizarre and nonsensical metaphors possible are used (and then overused), and some action and more brutal aspects of the story are long and drawn out while others (anything from assaults on the main character to violence to even simply walking down a hallway) are dismissed with a vague half-sentence that leaves you confused and lost for several paragraphs before you realize that happened. The icing on the top of the cake has to be just how atrocious the world building is. You have no sense for these nations, what their rivalry stems from, what relations are now, the landscape of the political climate, or even the climate for that matter. It is excruciatingly vague. TL;DR: This book isn't even worth a fun hate-read to make fun of it. I've read through to book 2 (which did have an editor) and it's almost entirely unreadable as well. The writing is the worst I have ever seen, the author is a hack, and the books seem to not only encourage but laud the benevolent and kind masters who help their poor slaves live a life rather than, I don't know, bump into windows all day like human flies.