Two Princes of Summer ~ Nissa Leder (Whims of Fae #1)

★★☆☆☆

To live in dreams is a waste of reality.

The Writing and Worldbuilding

Oh dear this is really bad. But in a kinda good way?

So, this felt like something I would have written at the height of my fairy craze when I was 12 years old. In fact, this feels even more like a terrible vampire book I wrote during that time, almost word for word. It's written with that particular styleless style that people with zero narrative voice always use, where the MC is ~witty~ and lacks personality other than being pretty. For being a book supposedly about vampires - sorry, I mean ~high fae~ - it's not lyrical whatsoever, full of awkward exposition and that iconic YA brand of unrealistic dialogue and behavior from every single character.

Besides its more ~scandalous~ parts (like the swears and the sexual stuff) this is basically the quintessential preteen dream of an ~edgy~ fairy book. It has the iconic YA fae who are for all intents and purposes just vampires that are born and grow up, and even has the mystical beings from an alternate dimension dress like 17th-century dandies and have indoor plumbing despite living in a medieval style castle. And they all speak like totally radical bad boys from the early 2000s - you know the kind, that spiked their hair and wore guyliner - or like bored cashiers at a supermarket. Scarlett, despite still being in high school, lives alone because her dad is AWOL and her mom is dead and her sister spends most of her time living at her college dorm. Because that's very realistic. Child services definitely would not have gotten involved after her mother committed suicide. The book was clearly very well thought out. Clearly.

The plot was predictable and extremely tropey and cliche. The only good thing was that I honestly didn't really know who would win the Battle of the Heirs. Besides that one thing, though, there was no originality to anything. The actual different courts were sort of cool, except that we only really knew anything about two, maybe three of them. The magic system itself was full of holes and overall seemed to have few rules. The environment was just a white room and the other people inhabiting the Summer Court held zero presence so it felt like the only people who existed were the people currently on the page. The mortal world felt essentially the same but because I live in the mortal world irl I could use my imagination to fill in the gaps. Which isn't a good thing.

She'd dug her own grave, but maybe, just maybe, there was a way to escape it.

The Characters

Scarlett: She's your classic "I'm not like other girls - in fact, I might actually be a secret fairy princess" YA heroine who lacks any personality besides her unusually beautiful face, Mary Sue skills that always come in handy, and dead mother. The dead mother was actually the most interesting part of her personality. She kind of had a character arc, and I sort of liked it, but it was more like someone in the other room was whispering an arc and she just absorbed it via osmosis.

Cade: He's a straight up rapist. No, he doesn't actually get to rape her in this, but he definitely wanted to, all Rhysand style, so overall, I hated his guts from the moment I met him. There's some nuance there - that guy in the other room is thinking very loudly about nuance - but not enough to make him sympathetic at all.

Raith: Fun fact: wraith is the only word that really rhymes with Faith.

Raith was okay. He's basically just the Damon in the Salvatore family parallel so I liked him and he was a better guy than his brother (because it's not exactly hard to be better than Cade) but he was still a douchebag, just a more interesting douchebag.

Kassandra: She's just the obvious evil queen. Except it made no sense because everyone kept calling her "Miss Kassandra" like she was a slave owner in 17th-century Alabama or a 1st-grade teacher. She was the queen. Why didn't they call her royal honorifics? It's literally not hard to do.

Jaser and Poppy: Jaser was nice but I kept seeing Jesper from Six of Crows and the personalities were basically the same so. Poppy had some completely random retroactive exposition during the climax that was entirely unnecessary. I was generally indifferent to her.

Ashleigh and Natalie: Were they really characters or were they plot devices behind cardboard cutouts?

Whatever you're willing to do to become ruler is who you'll be as king. There's no difference.

Conclusion

It isn't good but sometimes it's hilariously bad. The best thing about this book is the cover. And for being a self-published book, the formatting and cover are actually very professional looking. It had a nice aesthetic that did not extend to the novel itself. I won't be continuing the series.

Buy the book here:

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