what's this Captive Prince about? I keep seeing it in my feed!
OKAY SO Captive Prince is a trilogy by C.S. Pacat about two princes who hate each other, begrudgingly ally with each other, and ever-so-slowly fall in love. Prince Damen is betrayed by his brother, who steals his throne and sells him as a slave to Prince Laurent, who hates everyone from Damen’s country but especially Damen himself as he killed Laurent’s brother in battle. So it’s imperative that Damen keep his identity secret as he tries to escape and get home.
PROS:
incredible character development
complex and fascinating worldbuilding and royal intrigue
super-slow-burn m/m romance with the most rewarding payoff of my LIFE
CONS
all the trigger warnings. all of them. death and violence? check. child sexual abuse? check. sex slaves and all that that implies? DOUBLE CHECK. TRIPLE CHECK, EVEN. In some ways the whole consent and intimacy thing is handled beautifully to the point of tears. In other ways there are... problems, particularly toward the beginning of the series. (Bluntly: I’m pretty sure the author set out to write a titillating little master/slave story and it got away from her. Traces of that premise remain.)
seriously, some of the sexual stuff was enough to really squick me out in the beginning and I don’t have any kind of history or triggers involving that. so be warned about that. but if you can stick it out, I find the rest of the story to be 100% worth it.
racial stuff, kinda? I mean, Damen is dark-skinned and sold to a light-skinned man as a slave. Damen himself has a sexual preference for fair-skinned blondes that borders on the obsessive. But he’s not a slave because of his skin color, no one is, and racism as we know it doesn’t seem to be a thing in their ‘verse. Also Damen is dark-olive Mediterranean, not black, as is the author herself. So it’s not quite what it looks like at a glance.
These books are not for everyone but I adore them so hard. And that is the deal with Captive Prince.
