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I've joined the Creator Accountability Network (CAN) as a provisionally credentialed creator! The provisional period is three months long, and at the end of that time I'll be fully credentialed if nothing disqualifying comes to light.  I'll be excerpting details from their website as the best way to explain what this is and what it means for me as a content creator and for you as readers and audience members. The short version is that I've undergone ethics training as part of the credentialing process, and that if you feel my actions have harmed you (now or in the future), you can report harassment, abuse, or other harm to CAN. Quotes in the rest of this post are from CAN's website as of August 16th, 2025. Here's the long version: From CAN's mission and purpose statements:  "The Creator Accountability Network empowers Community Members to build trust with Content Creators through ethical training and credentialing, victim-centered reporting of unethical...

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons (A Chorus of Dragons, #1)

Kihrin is a bastard orphan who grew up on storybook tales of long-lost princes and grand quests. When he is claimed against his will as the long-lost son of a treasonous prince, Kihrin finds that being a long-lost prince isn't what the storybooks promised.

Far from living the dream, Kihrin finds himself practically a prisoner, at the mercy of his new family's power plays and ambitions. He also discovers that the storybooks have lied about a lot of other things things, too: dragons, demons, gods, prophecies, true love, and how the hero always wins.

Then again, maybe he’s not the hero, for Kihrin isn’t destined to save the empire.

He’s destined to destroy it . . .

TITLE: The Ruin of Kings
AUTHOR: Jenn Lyons
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
YEAR: 2019
LENGTH: 560 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: N/A

Queer Rep Summary: Not far enough to assess, the book is shelved as LQBTQ+.

*I received a review copy as part of the 2021 Hugo voters packet. 

DNF 12%.

I was having trouble following the story across points in time, as the narrators didn't feel different enough to be distinctive. The perspectives are labeled at the start of each chapter, but I felt adrift, bored, and uninterested. I did not like whatever character is writing the footnotes, I know the point is that the main narrator had different information from whoever is providing the commentary, but it felt like I was being jerked around since the main narrator would say one piece of information then the footnote narrator would immediately contradict them with yet more worldbuilding I didn't yet have the context to care about.

CW for slavery, body horror, blood, sexual assault (not depicted), gore (graphic), torture, death (graphic).

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