A Vampire Death Tournament Ate My Whole Weekend

A mortal, a tournament, and the man who raised her to be a weapon

Oraya is human. That is the whole problem. She lives in Sivrinaj, a city ruled by vampires, and she survives only because Vincent, the vampire king of the House of Night, took her in as a child and made her his daughter. Made her lethal, too. She has spent her life learning to fight things that are stronger and faster than she will ever be, and she carries her fear like a blade she keeps sharpened on purpose.

Then comes the Kejari, a brutal once-a-generation tournament held in honor of Nyaxia, the goddess of the night. Win it, and the goddess grants you a single wish. Oraya wants one thing: to stop being prey. So she enters a competition designed to kill her, in an arena full of vampires who would love nothing more, and she immediately runs into Raihn, a charming, infuriating, suspiciously helpful vampire who wants to team up.

You know where this is going. I knew where this was going. The pleasure is not in the surprise, it is in the execution.

What actually works, and the thing that nearly lost me

Let me be honest about the front half. The tournament setup is the most overused engine in this entire genre right now. Every third romantasy is a magical competition where the heroine is secretly special and the rules exist mostly to force two attractive people into a shared tent. When I hit the early trials I felt that specific fatigue, the “oh, this again” feeling, and I almost set it down. I want to be fair about that, because a lot of readers do bounce off the first hundred pages for exactly this reason, and they are not wrong.

But Broadbent is smarter than the frame she chose. What saves this book is Oraya’s interiority. Her fear is not a costume. She is genuinely, mortally outmatched, and the narration never lets you forget it, so every fight has real weight because the math is against her. And the romance, when it finally gets going, earns its slowness. Raihn and Oraya trade competence and banter before they trade anything else, and the tension is built on trust neither of them can afford to give. When it finally breaks (and this is peak spice, closed-door this is not, so consider yourself warned) it lands because the emotional debt was paid first.

Raihn is the reason the internet lost its mind, and I get it. He is the good kind of morally gray, the kind where you are pretty sure he is lying to you about something important and you cannot decide if that makes it better. The reveal in the back third recontextualizes a lot, and I will not touch it, but I will say I gasped out loud on my couch and then immediately said a word I will not print here.

Here is my one real gripe beyond the tournament cliche: the prose gets repetitive. Oraya thinks about the same three fears in the same phrasings more than a tight edit would allow, and the middle trials blur together a little. This is a book that could have been maybe fifteen percent shorter and lost nothing. It is not a slog exactly, but there are stretches where I was skimming toward the next Raihn scene, and I suspect I am not alone.

Now let me question my own taste for a second, because I owe you that. Part of why I forgave the repetition is that I read most of this on a miserable rainy Sunday when I did not want to think, and a book that asks nothing of you except emotional investment is a genuine mercy on a day like that. Would I be as generous if I had read it on a plane, cranky and sober-minded? Maybe not. Comfort reading has a way of grading on a curve. I am aware of that and I am keeping my 4 anyway, because the ending genuinely got me.

Small tangent: I love that this started as a self-published book. It got picked up by Bramble later and given the big shiny sprayed-edge treatment, but its whole rise came from readers shoving it at each other. There is something I find deeply satisfying about a vampire book clawing its way up purely on word of mouth. It is the kind of scrappy origin the genre gatekeepers never see coming.

A death tournament is just a delivery mechanism. What Broadbent actually writes is a story about a girl deciding whether the person who made her into a weapon gets to keep aiming her.

About Carissa Broadbent

Broadbent came up the indie route, writing fantasy and romantasy on her own terms for years before this book turned her into a name people say with a hand over their heart. She has talked openly about the grind of self-publishing before the big deal came, and honestly it shows in the work: this is someone who learned to hook a reader because she had to, without a marketing budget doing it for her. She writes vampires with actual stakes (I am so sorry) and heroines who are angry in ways that feel specific rather than decorative. The Crowns of Nyaxia world has kept expanding since, which tells you she was building something bigger than one tournament all along.

If this one got its hooks in you, read these next

• A Deal with the Elf King by Elise Kova. If the “mortal thrown into a dangerous magical world and bound to a powerful non-human man” setup is your drug, this scratches it with a gentler heart.
• From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout. The obvious comp, and for good reason: forbidden guardian-romance energy, big world, huge spice, a heroine discovering what she really is.
• House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas. If you want the same emotional maximalism at triple the page count and with a mystery baked in.
• The rest of the Nightborn Duet, obviously. Book one does not fully resolve, and if the ending does to you what it did to me, you are not going to be capable of stopping.

Grab a copy on Amazon here if you want to see what all the noise was about.

For your book club

1. Vincent raised Oraya as both daughter and weapon. Is that love, control, or something the book refuses to let us cleanly separate?
2. Oraya’s fear is her defining trait. Does the constant narration of it deepen her, or did it start to wear on you the way it did on me?
3. The tournament frame is deeply familiar. Did Broadbent do enough to justify using it, or would this story have been stronger without the competition scaffolding?
4. Raihn keeps things from Oraya, and the book still wants us to root for the romance. Where is your personal line on a love interest who withholds the truth?
5. The book leans hard on the mortal-among-monsters idea. What is it really saying about who gets counted as prey and who gets to decide?

Anyway. I started reading this to figure out what everyone was screaming about, and I finished it fully understanding why, which is a dangerous thing to admit in public. The tournament is a cliche. The prose runs long. And I still stayed up until 2am, and I still bought book two before I finished this sentence…