Vengeance by Rebecca Grey

In the month of May, we were able to participate in a book tour, hosted by Fictional Friends Book Tours. It was a great opportunity for us!

It was a creative challenge, and I created a bookish music Playlist for it on Spotify.

So, here is the synopsis of Vengeance, book on of the Prince’s Games, by Rebecca Grey.

One deadly game. Six unlikely competitors. And a mercenary hell-bent on killing the king.

The Oasis Games were never meant for Humans. Nilsa Windsor, however, plans to not only compete, but to win.

Drawn to her humanity, Marcello Torres, Nilsa’s new team lead, sees more in his new mortal companion than just skill. Falling for him, though, can only lead to one thing—heartbreak.

If Nilsa has any hope of surviving and completing her mission, she’ll deny these new budding emotions and focus on the one thing that matters:

Killing King Caspar.

So, I’ll start with my review first, since both of us read the book…

While I rated the book 4 stars on Goodreads, I felt that was super generous. Vengeance is supposed to be this Urban Fantasy/Dystopian novel with smut… and yeah, I guess it was. However, it wasn’t amazing like everyone raves it to be. It sounds good on paper, but really it’s just okay, if that.

Our main character, Nilsa, has a lot of grit growing up the way she did: in a world of killers, kill or be killed, especially as the human known. She has the potential to be this really awesome character. Instead, she relishes in killing “people” for a lack of a better term, she’s a hypocrite like no other, and she’s flat… she has almost zero growth through out the whole book. Honestly, there wasn’t any growth until over halfway through, and even then I’m not sure what magically happened for the growth to happen.

The smut is unneeded. It doesn’t really make the story any better, other than it points out the fact that Nilsa is indeed the hypocrite I said she was. It’s filler. The cover art also doesn’t make much sense for me, it doesn’t flow with the story… it seems like it was chosen to boost sales and that’s about it.

*Spoilers Ahead*

The ending honestly wasn’t all that surprising. We knew one of them was going to be prince, right? The twist being that there were actually two. Which, they were brothers, okay, but the one was adopted into Marcellos home (a secondary character), while Marcello maintained a friendship with the other and apparently knew the whole time who the Prince’s were? When, it was stated that the King was the only one who knew I assumed not even the Prince’s knew but… okay.

Anyways, this twist with two prince’s means Nilsa can kill one (probably not the one she sort of befriended) and kill the King, keeping to the agreement she made as a mercenary. Yay for her.

Hedda was probably my favorite character. She had actual depth and was the comedic relief. I was sad that the Vampires died. I really liked them too.

I can’t say I will read book two.

Keep reading to see my sisters opinion on Vengeance.

Darian here to give you my review on Vengeance, I was not a fan. I was but I wasn’t and I feel I’m going to be a bit harsh with my review. I got to chapter two and wanted to put the book down and not pick it back up. Why? The first sex scene; I would not have called this BDSM, this to me seemed like abuse. I’ve read other books with BDSM in them and they were not like this. I sent quotes to a friend to ask if I was being crazy about it or not. “No concern for my satisfaction or comfort.” “He doesn’t apologize. Joss never apologizes until after, sometimes not even then.” Spoiler? He slammed her face down into the desk. That doesn’t sound like fun to me. It just wasn’t needed.

I really dislike our main character, she had no growth. I don’t think people hate her because she’s human, I think it’s because of her personality. All of our side characters were great, like Cherokee, my favorite is Hedda. She’s an Orc and I don’t know why but I just couldn’t stop imagining her as Princess Fiona from Shrek but with modern clothes. She’s pretty cool.

I felt the book started to pick up once we got to the games. I wish we could have actually seen the whole week instead of two days but those were still interesting. I did like that our main character finally felt like she wasn’t invincible. You need to be tough in a world that has killed almost all of your kind but she doesn’t seem tough, just annoying. The concept of the story is great, and I was surprised to see who the prince is but I just couldn’t get pass my dislike for our main character. I think a break from her might have helped, as if it was told from multiple point of views. Our vampire friends mentioned a resistance and Nilsa couldn’t decide if she wanted to be apart of this or not. Considering her plan is to kill the king she would be all for it; maybe that changes in book two, but I doubt it.