RE: Monarch

Blurb

To save the kingdom, he’ll have to stop his own murder…

It’s hard to be a drunken idiot when the world keeps burning down around you. Cairn, the charming-yet-utterly-irresponsible heir to the Uskarrion throne, is all too happy to toss the crown aside. But an invasion, conspiracy, and rise of a terrifying villain result in his untimely death.

Then, Cairn reawakens. It’s a decade earlier and he’s in his childhood body. But he remembers everything… There’s much to accomplish. First, however, he’d really love to stop himself from dying.

After cementing itself as one of the most beloved progression fantasy web serials on Royal Road, the RE: Monarch Series now comes to Kindle Unlimited, and Audible (narrated by Luke Daniels). Perfect for fans of Bryce O’Connor, Luke Chmilenko, and Cale Plamann.

Thoughts

As of writing this review, I have read the first published book on Amazon.

For those worried about a groundhog day situation, rest assured, the time loops in this story are nothing like that. Instead, Cairn has a few different scenarios in which his time-loop-on-death curse kicks into action, but the circumstances and problems in each scenario are vastly different.

That makes my normal job of “If you like X you’ll like this,” difficult, because this book is not similar to the biggest time-loop progression fantasy out there: Mother of Learning.

Okay, so let’s break it down. Characters are great. Cairn is not a generic young white male insert with no personality. The man a backstory, the man has past trauma, an abusive father, complex relationships, and has a slew of issues to work through. Side characters are also fleshed out. So, big tick there.

For the time looping, it’s not actually used how it often is in this genre, like how Zorian uses it to grind skills over and over. Instead, there’s actually not that much progression in terms of raw power growth and the rapid accumulation of skills like many serials. Instead, the time loops—or more accurately the primary loop in the first book—has a far greater focus on politics and intrigue.

So, if you’re a fan of factions, power plays, double-crossing, blackmail, information hunting and the like, you’ll have a great time. Through no fault of the author, this a theme that invariably always confuses me, probably became my memory has a half-life of seven nanoseconds and I get secondary and ternary characters confused all the time. If I could change one thing to reduce my confusion, it would be clear breaks (literally just a line break, maybe an epigraph) showing where, in the middle of a chapter, we’re actually now doing a character flashback with no warning. Often I got more than a page in before cluing on that between one paragraph and the next we travelled back into Cairn’s childhood.

Once we get through the three main loop scenarios in book one, book two has a clear direction and a number of compelling hooks to draw you in. They’re not annoying cliffhangers, just well-done foreshadowing and world-building.