Review: The King by Skye Warren

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Masterpiece Duet #1
Release - June 27, 2017
Genre - Dark Romance
Heroine POV - 1st person
Length - 308 pages
Review of The Prince

The highest stakes...

My father gambles every night, falling deeper and deeper into debt. When he hits the bottom, he places a new bet: his daughter. I'm his entry bet to the biggest underground poker game.

Every kind of danger circles the velvet-covered table, but only one man makes me tremble.

A trailer park princess.

The son of a criminal king.

We don't belong together, but I'm caught in a twisted game.

His eyes meet mine with dark promise. And when he puts down his cards, I know I'm going to lose more than my body. I'm going to lose everything.

Find your copy of The King here:
Goodreads | Amazon

MY REVIEW

Penny’s struggle is real. She lives in a trailer with her deadbeat dad in the worst part of town. The highest level of success she can hope for is to be a corner girl. But Penny is too smart for that and dreams of escaping the only life she’s ever known. Working a going nowhere job at the diner doesn’t even help her make ends meet but her loyalty to her father keeps her right in the gutter with him.

Penny’s father has got to be the most unsuccessful gambler of all time. He gambles every night with money he doesn’t have. His priority is the bet, not taking care of his only child. He bets with money he borrows and struggles every single time to pay it back. He finally bets more than he will ever have and in order to pay it back he bets his most valuable possession - his daughter. He owes a large sum to the biggest game in town. Who’s the boss? None other than the wild boy from the woods - Damon.

After sacrificing his freedom in order to protect Penny from his father, Damon had grown into some sort of Kingpin in their city. His name drew fear, lust and envy from everyone and he did nothing to stop it. He was rich and successful at whatever it was he did. He grew up to be the most beautiful man Penny had ever known, but the fact that he had followed in his father’s footsteps was a major turnoff. I was willing to give sweet Damon the benefit of the doubt.

♚A true testament to the how much I enjoyed this author’s writing is that I hated the narrator but loved the book. Go figure. Okay, maybe hate is a strong word, but there was definitely more than one occasion where I wanted to wring Penny’s neck. For most of this book I found her to be rude, discourteous, disingenuous, inconsiderate, ungrateful, disrespectful, and the list goes on. While I respected her intellect and the difficult situations she found herself in, I wasn’t a fan of the way she treated people. Especially Damon. Maybe it’s because of my great affection for him why I couldn’t tolerate her intolerable attitude and behavior. So kudos to Skye Warren for getting me to fall in love with this story despite my resistance towards Penny.
♚Did I already mention how much I loved Damon? I would have given anything to get his POV. During the many events that took place in this story, his perspective would have been appreciated to balance out the immaturity of Penny’s. I found that quite a few details were left out and I think they would have been explained better in his voice. I hope to see something from him in the next book. I also hope that there will be a better and more cohesive connection between Damon and Penny. In this book she's a bit too antagonistic to rate her tender feelings as genuine and I'm hoping that this won't be the case in the next one. Damon deserves someone of his own, someone who not only understands him but loves him in spite of all he's done or will do.
♚I adored Damon. He was so incredibly sexy to me. He was cold, indifferent, and seemingly callous while at the same time, mostly in the quiet, he was sensitive, protective, thoughtful and loyal, especially towards Penny. I have no doubt that she has owned his heart for years and it was obvious in the little and big things he was willing to do to make her life easier.

Okay, so I think it’s obvious that Damon was the one to watch in this story. He was everything to me. He made this story worth reading, in my opinion. Warren gave us a character that demanded attention and I couldn’t look away. I was captivated from the first page until the last and can’t wait to get started on The Queen just to see where the author is going to take us with these characters and I’m interested to see if they’ll be granted a happily ever after together.