Hi everyone, welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today, I’m going to review the series Tide Lords by Jennifer Fallon. This series consists of four books: The Immortal Prince, The Gods of Amyrantha, The Palace of Impossible Dreams and The Chaos Crystal, and I will be reviewing all four of these books here. Spoiler Alert.
The Immortal Prince is a book that I added to my TBR pile after it was suggested and recommended in a fantasy series recommendations video as the first book of a fantasy series worth checking out. And when I started reading it (I’m talking about the series as a whole here, not just Book 1), it seemed promising enough for me to like it, and I was liking it…until I didn’t. Here’s why.
The Immortal Prince starts out strong. It starts with the end of an era. A cataclysm. A thousand years later, a man is walking to his death. A murderer sentenced to die by beheading. A man who wants to die. But he isn’t beheaded. He is hanged. And he doesn’t die because he is immortal. Hanging won’t do anything to him. He is a Tide Lord. Nonetheless, Cayal, also known as the immortal prince, wants to die. He has lived for so long that he is utterly bored and has nothing left to live for. So, he tried to get beheaded. The only way he knows that will change him. But he isn’t and thus begins the immortal prince’s journey to find a way to die.
What is a Tide Lord? A Tide Lord is an immortal being capable of manipulating the Tide; A Tide Lord is at his most powerful during a high tide, but it has been a thousand years since the last high tide and now, at the peak of the longest low tide ever, the Tide Lords and other immortals are at their weakest and have been in hiding waiting for the high tide to return. They have been in hiding for so long though that nobody remembers them so, naturally, nobody believes Cayal when he tells them that he is not only an immortal but also a Tide Lord.
Instead, they believe that he is feigning insanity to avoid his sentence. And to prove that he is not crazy, they need to prove that he is lying. So they send a scholar to question him and evaluate his sanity. Enter Arkady Desean, a researcher and historian of the university that has been studying the Tide Lords and their legends for years. Now, Cayal’s sole purpose throughout the entire series is to kill himself. He is desperate. And, at this point in the story, I found his character interesting enough that I wanted to stick around and see if he finds something worth living for along the way. And obviously, I thought, that would be the female protagonist of the story. It’s a little cliché and tropey, I know, but I do enjoy a good and well-written romance within a larger story, if I like the main characters well enough and find myself rooting for them. This isn’t a romance, but I did think that Cayal’s relationship with Arkady would be an important part of his character arc in finding something to live for. I was wrong.
We learn that there are other Tide Lords and that Cayal was the one that caused the last cataclysm—the one we witnessed at the beginning of the book. There are also other immortals that do not have the power of a Tide Lord, but they are still powerful and conniving in their own right. And I found these characters to be one of the best things about the series. They are all very well written. They are self-centered, power-hungry, and very powerful, a good combination for disaster. Opposite them are the members of the Cabal of the Tarot, a secret society created to kill the immortals, but most importantly, the Tide Lords. The king’s spymaster, Declan Hawkes, is a member of the Tarot. He is also Arkady’s closest friend. And then, there are the Crasii. The Crasii are slaves, hybrids between humans and an animal form—dog, cat, lizard, etc.,—that were created by the Tide Lords to be their servants.
What’s not to like about this story? There are crazy, power-hungry, and devious immortals, a secret society that wants to kill them, and possibly, though, not entirely sure, a slow-burn romance…
Here are my issues with the series:
The main characters: Up to this point in my review, I’ve mentioned them briefly. Cayal, Arkady, and Declan. For starters, Cayal. Like I said before, he is desperate to find a way to die. And this in itself is not a bad thing, but as the story progresses, he doesn’t change. At the end, he’s still the same person he was at the beginning of the series. A very self-centered and egotistic person that only uses people to get what he wants, and the further on I read, the less I liked him.
Arkady, I have mixed feelings about. I liked her character and personality at first, but then she lost all the wit and cleverness she showed in the first book and in the other three books just became a full-fledged damsel-in-distress. EVERYTHING happens to her. In Book 1, she’s kidnapped; in Book 2, she’s exiled, and in Book 3, she’s sold into slavery. And, in every single one of those situations, the first thing she thinks about and does to stay alive is to sleep with the men that have power over her. She’s supposed to be a well-educated woman. And I get that sometimes there’s only so much a woman can do in these types of situations, especially in a male-dominated world, but every time? That’s her solution to solve every bad situation she’s in every time? And in Book 3 and 4, the only thing left for her to do now that everything that could have gone wrong for her has gone wrong, is to debate whether she should choose Cayal or Declan. Because, yes, there’s a love triangle… but I’ll get to that later.
And then Declan. I liked Declan a lot. At first. And then he turns into a Tide Lord, and his character arc goes downhill. He becomes another Cayal. By the end of the series, I did not like him at all.
The relationship between Cayal-Arkady-Declan: I was not a fan of this love triangle. At first, I rooted for Cayal and Arkady and then for Arkady and Declan. Cayal and Arkady’s relationship is just lust, and while Declan does love Arkady, he later becomes too domineering and controlling, and makes a deal with Cayal for him to stay away from Arkady in exchange for his help in finding a way for him to die. WTF?!? Yeah, didn’t like him at all after that.
Book 4: Book 4 was a complete disappointment for me. Why? The ending. And I don’t mean just the ending of the book but the ending of the entire series. At this point in the story, a handful of immortals (the oldest among them) are tired of living in a world full of immortals and they want to find a new world to live in, where it is just them (kind of selfish is you ask me). But to do that, they need the chaos crystal, which has been lost for centuries. Eventually they find it, and they lure Cayal into being the one to open the portal between worlds because whoever holds the crystal dies when the portal closes. This could be, after all, the only way for him to die…but in doing so, everybody else in Amyrantha, the world where the story takes place, dies too. And this is what happens. Everybody that was left behind died. Needless to say, I didn’t like this ending because I felt that all the time I had invested in these characters and world was for naught because they all just ended up blowing up in the end. It was infuriating. Worse part, there is no closure. Cayal doesn’t die, even though this is what he wanted throughout the entire series, and the love triangle between Cayal, Arkady, and Declan isn’t resolved because it is she who ends up lost in limbo after the portal between worlds closed, and she is somewhere where neither Cayal nor Declan can get to her. Yeah…infuriating. The Tide Lords now live on Earth. And all the major catastrophes that have happened here, like the death of the dinosaurs, are because of them.
Uhhh…no.
The Crasii: The Crasii are a race of slaves that the Tide Lords created in a moment of boredom just to have someone to serve them. They are a hybrid between humans and an animal—most commonly dogs and cats—that have an innate impulse to obey. In the series, there are 3 Crasii that have a role in the story: Warlock—later Cecil—, Boots—later Tabitha—, and Tiji. I didn’t like the Crasii or dislike them, and I thought that if the story hadn’t had them, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I also didn’t think the relationship between Warlock and Boots all that relevant to the story and plot. Tiji, on the other hand, a lizard Crasii, started out as an interesting character but then lost most of her independence when she met her boyfriend. It was annoying. Here’s an independent Crasii that knows how to survive and has survived on her own for many years, but the minute she finds a male lizard Crasii, and mates with him, she loses all that and becomes another damsel-in-distress and defers to him in everything. It was basically like reading about a Crasii Arkady.
Not a fan.
I Did Not Like This Series At All. It’s only redeeming quality is how well-written some of the other Tide Lords and immortals are, but I would not recommend this series at all.
