The Last Life of Prince Alastor by Alexandra Bracken
The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding #2
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Publication Date: February 5th, 2019
Rating: 4 Stars
Source: Gift from Emma
Format: ARC
Pages: 448
Summary (from Goodreads):
Three hundred years ago, fate bound Prosper Redding and Prince Alastor of the Third Realm together. Now the human boy and fiend heir to the demon kingdom must put aside a centuries-old blood feud to save everything they love.
Alastor will guide Prosper through the demon realm—under one huge condition: Prosper must enter into a contract with the malefactor residing in him, promising eternal servitude in the afterlife. With Prosper's sister in the clutches of the evil queen Pyra, Prosper has no choice but to agree.
But when they arrive in Alastor's deliciously demonic home, the realm is almost as alien to Alastor as it is to Prosper—the lowest fiends have dethroned the ruling malefactors, while an unfathomable force called the Void is swiftly consuming the realm. The desperate fiends cling to the one person who says she can stop it: Pyra.
As Prosper embarks on a perilous rescue mission to the Tower of No Return, he can't help but feel for the demons losing their home—even Alastor, who lives by a set of rules that have vanished in a new world.
With the fates of humans and demons at odds, the battle lines are drawn. Long ago, Prosper's ancestor Honor Redding proved that humans and demons could never be friends. But is Prosper like his ancestor? And is Alastor the same demon who was betrayed by the one human he cared for?
The Last Life of Prince Alastor picks up right where The Dreadful Tale of Prosper Redding left off. Prosper has just created a contract with Alastor so that Alastor will help him navigate through the Third Realm to save his sister. But things in the Third Realm are very different under Alastor's sister's rule than they were when he was last there. The lowest caste of fiends have more power and there is a void swallowing up everything in sight because of an overuse of magic.
So, it has been a hot minute since I finished this book and this is just the first moment that I am feeling particularly inspired to write a review for it. So, sorry that this review might not be particularly in depth.
This middle grade series is so much fun! When Halloween time rolls around, this will be a series you want to read. A duology about a boy who is possessed by a fiend (or rather a demon) and who spends the first book living mostly in a haunted house in Salem and who's best friend is a witch? Just perfect for September/October.
This book has a slightly different format than the first one. In this book, it jumps back to Alastor's POV in the past on a few occasions to show us how this whole mess started with Alastor and Honor. I found this to be super interesting to see how the contracts they made kind of evolved from being things that Honor wanted to help his people to things that basically screwed over other people.
I loved exploring the Third Realm in this book and learning how things work down there and learning more about different Realms and how they were kind of created and what not.
I did feel like this book had some relatively dark things in it for a middle grade. I will say that I have not read extensively in middle grade so I don't really know what is and isn't stuff that you would normally see in one. However, at one point I do remember seeing Alex talk about how she had to call the demons something else to make it more kid friendly, so that is why I feel like the two things that I am thinking of are kind of dark for a middle grade.
The first thing I am thinking of deals with the changelings. You may recall that after a certain point in the first book, no one has seen Toad or Eleanor for awhile. We run into them again in the Third Realm in a marketplace being sold with a handful of other changelings for meat. So, Prosper has to take a bit of a detour from finding Prue to save the changelings. But when they finally make it to the house where the changelings are to be served, they aren't able to save them all and I believe it was implied that they were already cooked and served.
Which, like.. cooking and eating meat isn't something particularly taboo or anything, but changelings are basically like implied to be pets and the fact that some of them didn't make it feels dark to me for a middle grade.
The other instance that I am thinking of happens more shortly after they arrive in the Third Realm. Prosper gets picked up along with some vampires and they are on their way to basically an execution. When Pyra came into power, she took power away from the fiends who had always had it and gave it to the ones who didn't. And you don't see any of the types of fiends that Alastor was accustomed to seeing out and about and it seemed to me to be that they were basically exterminated because they wouldn't apologize for how they behaved before in keeping the lower fiends down.
So, like.. all in all, not bad for a book that I would normally read, but like I said, it just felt dark for a middle grade. Maybe I'm wrong, but I guess I just wasn't expecting content like that??
I also thoroughly enjoyed the relationship between Alastor and Prosper. I love Alastor's character and all of his hilarious insults. I liked Pyra, like she's bad and whatever, but I like that she gave power to the underdogs and was doing everything in her power to save her people. I also liked seeing a different side to Prosper's "evil" grandmother.
Overall, I just really liked this book. It was fun and a great sequel. I can't think of anything that I personally would complain about, but I feel like the two "dark" things I mentioned above may be things to keep in mind?
I love Alexandra Bracken's work and I can't wait to see what she comes out with next!
Have you read this series yet? What did you think of it?
