Crown me yours by Liv Zander

 Crown Me Yours

by Liv Zander

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶🌶

Blurb:

Wed him. Bed him. Slit his throat.

I killed the king.
Crowned myself in his blood,
But the curse still festers.

To break it, I need Death,
On his knees,
A ring on his finger.
My blade at his throat.

The god fights me to the grave,
Evades my touch,
Mocks my wanting.

He would rather tear himself apart,
Than let me close enough to end this.
But I didn't come this far to lose.
I came to crown him mine.

Welcome to your wedding, my love.

Crown Me Yours is a dark fantasy romance novel, and book two in the Heartstring Duet. The two-part story features deception, mystery, more deception, a handsome liar, and the woman who wants to bury him, along with a HUDDTPMYL... Happily Until Death Does Them Part Many Years Later (yes, the author made that up). This world contains dark elements, violence, and themes some may find disturbing. Readers can find more detailed information on www.livzander.com. What this book doesn't contain is a hero - because villains do it better.

My Review:

If you read my review of Crown Me Dead then you already know what Liv Zander is capable of. You already know she writes with a knife behind her back and a smile on her face and that she will absolutely use both of them on you without a single warning. You walked into this second book knowing that trauma was coming because she told you it was coming in every way a writer possibly can without actually saying the words out loud. You prepared yourself. You thought you were ready.

You were not ready. I was not ready. Nobody is ever ready for what Liv Zander does when she decides to truly let loose.

All hell broke loose in this book. That is the only way I know how to describe what happens inside these pages and even that does not fully capture the scale of it. This is not the quiet creeping dread of the first book, the knife you did not see coming until it was already in you. This is something bigger and louder and more devastating than that. This is Liv Zander removing all restraint and just going for it completely, and the result is a book that had me crying harder than I have cried over anything I have read in a very long time.

And here is the thing that I was not expecting at all. The trauma in this book is different. You came in braced for the kind of darkness that Crown Me Dead delivered so masterfully, the deception and the shadows and the web of lies that made your skin crawl in the most wonderful way. And yes, there is darkness here too because this is Liv Zander and darkness is part of her DNA as a writer. But the thing that breaks you open in Crown Me Yours is not the darkness. It is the love. The love is what gets you. The love is what did me completely in.

The way she wrote this story played in my head like watching a love story bloom to life in real time, something luminous and tender and beautiful, something you are rooting for with everything you have even as some quiet and knowing part of you understands that it is going to end in a way that costs you something. You know it. You feel it hovering over every sweet moment and every tender exchange and every page that makes your heart feel full. And you keep going anyway. You keep turning pages and falling deeper into it because the hope of it is just too beautiful to walk away from. That is what Liv Zander does to you. She makes you choose the feeling even when you know what the feeling is going to cost.

Our female main character in this book is someone I fell completely and utterly in love with, and I do not say that lightly. I like to think of myself as a go with the flow kind of person, someone who can adapt and adjust and keep moving when life gets difficult. But this woman puts me to shame. She gets dealt horrible hand after horrible hand after horrible hand and she does not crumble. She does not shut down. She keeps thinking. She keeps outmaneuvering the people around her, outsmarting situations that would have flattened most people entirely, finding ways through darkness that nobody else would have even thought to look for. Her optimism is not naive. It is not the optimism of someone who does not understand what is happening to her. It is the optimism of someone who understands completely and chooses to keep going anyway. That is the rarest and most powerful kind of strength and I was in awe of her on every single page.

I fell in love inside this book too. Not just with the characters and not just with the story, but with the experience of reading it, with the feeling of being so completely inside something that the rest of the world just falls away. That does not happen to me as often as I wish it did, and when it does I want to grab everyone around me and make them understand what they are missing.

I am not going to spoil a single thing because you deserve to come to this book completely open and let it do to you what it did to me. What I will tell you is this. Do yourself a favor and pick it up. Do yourself a favor and read Crown Me Dead first if you have not already, because the payoff of arriving at Crown Me Yours with all of that context is immeasurable. And then do yourself the final and most important favor of having something nearby to cry into because you are absolutely going to need it.

Liv Zander wrote something extraordinary here. Something that lingers. Something that sits in your chest long after the last page and refuses to be quietly filed away and forgotten. This is the kind of book that changes the way you feel about reading for a little while, that raises the bar so high that everything you pick up afterward has to work a little harder to impress you. I am grateful for it and devastated by it in equal measure, which is exactly where the best books always leave you.