Blog Tour {Review & Giveaway}—The Kings of Charleston by Kat H. Clayton

Stopping by The LUV'NV today is The Kings of Charleston blog tour, organized by Xpresso Book Tours.
We got the pleasure of reading and reviewing this Young Adult Romance,
and you have a chance to enter to win a signed copy and a Kindle Paperwhite!

The Kings of Charleston

by Kat H. Clayton

Book #1 of The Kings of Charleston series

Publication: July 10th 2012 by Kat H Clayton
Genre: Young Adult Romance

Amazon B & N Indie Bound Goodreads

Casper Whitley is forced to move to Charleston, South Carolina where she’ll be the new kid her senior year of high school. Casper’s upset about the move until she meets the Roman family’s gorgeous son, Cal, but there’s a problem. A mystery surrounds him which can be summed up in one word ... Kythera. Never heard of it? Neither has Casper until she finds the word tattooed on cars, paintings and all her new friends.

After Casper’s life is threatened, someone is forced to tell the truth about her parents, the Romans and Kythera’s motives for her being in Charleston. Once the truth is revealed, she must decide whether to protect her family and Kythera’s secrets or walk away from everything she has ever known.

The Kings of Charleston  is one of those books I find hard to review. For one, I don't want to spoil the plot, which is the strongest attribute the book has. Two, I'm torn, with a lot of mixed feelings. There were parts I loved and others I didn't like at all.

As soon as I started the book, I was pulled into the female protagonist's life as the heir of a business empire, and I liked her immediately. Casper is no Southern Belle or typical teenage blue blood. She's a tomboy who loves horses and isn't at the top of the high school food chain though she comes from an affluent family. Although she has the perfect socialite mother, her hard-working father built the business from the ground up, and Casper's childhood sounded wholesome and down to earth along with charmed and exclusive.

She's an ordinary girl with possibly ideal circumstances, but that's just it—she's ordinary. By the end of the story, I didn't know how I felt about her, as a character. I liked her well enough, but I didn't love her. I wanted to see her grow, but as I did, I was underwhelmed. She started out as a small fish in a big pond. I felt she stayed that way, and I was more fascinated with the pond—the society, her parents and friends—than her.

Then there's Cal, the love interest. While he was mysterious and supposedly gorgeous, I didn't love him. That could just be me, though. There were moments he started to grow on me, but he was so secretive and rarely spent time with Casper that it was one step forward, two steps back with him, and I found the connection between them hard to believe. I needed more than "You're beautiful" coming out of his mouth to believe genuine affection.

I did, however, love Alex, one of Cal's best friends. Now he did mystery and gorgeous just right, as well as inner conflict. He oozed all that from every pore. He was fun, charming, and I could feel the war within him. The interaction and connection between him and Casper was more believable and palpable than hers and Cal's, too. All of the secondary characters and their relationships with Casper were great, actually. It was the main characters and their relationship that didn't work for me.

Although the Romance disappointed me, the mystery aspect was really intriguing and better written. I needed to know all about the secret society Casper finds herself thrown into and how she unravels it. There were parts I thought the writing needed some work—less sentence and action repetition, unnecessary details, etc.—but I couldn't put the book down until everything was revealed.

The Kings of Charleston  was good, just not what I was expecting and in the way I expected. With intrigue and unique elements, Kat Clayton captured a shady high society, and I'm interested enough in the storyline and the secondary characters to read the next book. Fans of YA novels with a mafia plot might want to check this one out.

eARC provided by the author via Xpresso Books Tours.
Thank you!

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Kat H. Clayton

Her Website | Twitter| Facebook | Goodreads

Kat has been a writer her entire life, but never pursued a writing career until the characters from a short story she wrote in high school refused to go away. Finally, she sat down and wrote their story which would became The Kings of Charleston series.



Kat has been an avid reader her entire life. She enjoys all genres, but particularly Mystery and Young Adult. Mary Higgins Clark is one of her favorite authors who inspired her love of mysteries. 



When she isn't writing, Kat loves to travel, try out new recipes and hang out with her husband. She is originally from Kentucky, but currently resides in South Georgia with her husband, a cat named Frank and a dog named Lil.

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