An Asian-inspired fantasy, And Break the Pretty Kings, follows Mirae through a battle with time to defeat an ancient monster.

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And Break the Pretty Kings was, unfortunately, a challenging read. I wanted to like the book but struggled to keep the story straight as I read along. And, if you’re wondering if it was the time travel element that was confusing, you would be wrong. In fact, that was both the most interesting and the easiest part of the story to understand.

Lacking Characterization

I wish I could have loved this book, but I struggled greatly with the characterization.

My biggest hindrance with And Break the Pretty Kings was the multiple names used for the characters. The characters here have multiple nicknames, all of which seem to be terms of endearment in Jeong’s native language. It would have been fine if it was just one nickname for one character, but that wasn’t the case.

This took me out of the story repeatedly as I was forced to navigate the context clues to see who was talking to whom to understand the story’s direction. It was hard to follow and keep track of who was who.

I’m not one to annotate a book, but this is one I probably should have.

My other biggest issue with the novel was Mirae.

Disconnected MC

Considering that so much happens in the story with Mirae, you would expect some character development from her. Mirae gets into these situations where she has to reevaluate how she will proceed. Time and time again, she continues to make the same mistakes. What can go wrong will go wrong because she doesn’t think things through. She doesn’t have all the facts, and she has no desire to get all the facts. She is very, very short-sighted, and she doesn’t change from the beginning of the novel to the end of the novel.

That was very frustrating because I wanted some sort of character development from her. I wanted her to recognize that she was not making the wisest decisions and needed to reevaluate how she would proceed. I saw no character growth from her, and considering everything that goes wrong in the novel, there would be some sort of characterization or character growth, but there’s none.

It also doesn’t make sense considering her power as the high horomancer, which is to switch places with her future self or even her past self. She knows she’s going to get into these situations. Yet, she doesn’t do anything to try to get herself out of the situation.

Now I know the saying: to know the future is to be shocked by it by trying to prevent something. The common trope is that you inadvertently caused the event to happen. But in this case, half the time Mirae switches places with herself, she thinks about how she gets to that point, and then Mirae just completely ignores it, so when it does happen, she’s like, oh no, how did I get here. That was so frustrating to read, making me very angry with her.

And Break the Pretty Kings also seems very unsure of itself. Another reviewer said it best that she’s very non-committal to the author. My opinion on that is you have Mirae, who sees the future or sometimes goes into the past, but nothing is set in stone for this story. Which makes sense. The future is constantly changing depending on your decisions, and that’s why the theory of the multiverse exists.

However, it goes beyond just the plot.

A lot of subtext will be a romance subplot to the story. You get flashes of it when Mirae switches places with herself. You get flashes of it in some of the character dynamics. However, nothing really comes from it, and as someone who doesn’t read romance, if you’re going to have some sort of romantic supply, you have to develop it, and it wasn’t developed at all. It was kind of mentioned here or there. Still, it wasn’t fleshed out, and that, to me, just added fuel to the fire that the story was very unsure of itself and, as the other reviewer said, very non-committal.

Final Thoughts

I really wanted to enjoy or even like And Break the Pretty Kings. Unfortunately, this was a novel that left me very confused. It left me detached, and ultimately, I struggled to connect to many facets of the novel.