Review Detail

Prince Khemri is one of ten million Princes raised from a toddler to be a ruler of the Empire. Or so he believes. His body has been augmented with tek to make him nearly immortal, and he's been conditioned to believe that everything and everyone exists to serve his every need.

Reality couldn't be further from the truth. Khemri's journey to discovering his real place in the Empire, and the value of the people he once considered substandard, is compelling. The plot twists serve to keep the reader fully engaged.

The beginning feels slow, mostly because the amount of backstory, world building, and unfamiliar terms/names we are innundated with in the first few chapters makes it hard to really sink into the world of the story and live there. But about four chapters in, the action gets going, the world begins to feel familiar enough that we can follow the story without getting hung up on extraneous details, and by the time the first major plot twist hits, we're hooked.

Khemri is a mostly unsympathetic character at first. Hard to like. Hard to root for. But this is by design. As his journey progresses, his character slowly grows and changes, until by the end of the book, this reader was a die hard Khemri fan.

Fascinating world building, a compelling story, and some nice subtle character growth make this a book worth reading.