Quick Take
- Narration: Sophie Eastlake sustains the elevated, almost Shakespearean emotional register that Simone’s prose demands, the tragedy of the final book requires a narrator who can hold grief and desire simultaneously, and she does.
- Themes: Political power and personal sacrifice, polyamorous love under pressure, Arthurian tragedy in contemporary form
- Mood: Operatic and anguished, politically tense, intensely intimate
- Verdict: The New Camelot trilogy closes with earned heartbreak, if you have made it this far, American King delivers the convergence of love and catastrophe that Simone has been building toward.
I came to American King having already spent considerable time in Sierra Simone’s New Camelot. There is something almost reckless about this trilogy’s central conceit: a modern retelling of the Arthurian legend in which Ash, the president, Greer, the first lady, and Embry, the vice president, form a three-person bond that is erotic, political, and genuinely tragic in the classical sense. By book three, all of those threads are pulled to their tightest, and the question is whether Simone can close the story with the weight it has accumulated over two previous volumes.
She can. American King is the best of the three, not because it is the most enjoyable to read, but because it is the most honest about what this love triangle was always going to cost. The synopsis frames it precisely: Ash is a tragic hero with a fatal flaw, and the flaw is not the unconventional love at the center of his life. It is the hubris of believing that building a political kingdom on the bones of a deeply personal past was ever going to end any other way.
The Arthurian Frame and What It Does to the Reader
One reviewer called the Arthurian connection odd, noting that the story of Arthur is myth rather than history. That is technically accurate, but it misses what Simone is doing with the source material. She is not using Camelot as a historical setting; she is using it as a tragic architecture. The power of the Arthur legend is precisely that we know how it ends before we begin, and every moment of happiness is colored by the inevitability of loss. American King asks you to know the Arthurian outcome and watch people you care about walk into it anyway. That is not odd. It is devastating, and it is the whole point.
The political dimension is more developed here than in the previous books. Ash and Greer running for re-election against Embry rather than alongside him creates a structure where the personal and the political are genuinely inseparable. The campaign becomes a proxy for the central question: can these three people who built something real together survive being adversaries, and what does it do to them to try? Simone’s answer is not comforting.
The Erotic Content in Context
One reviewer described the sex scenes as really hot in the middle of noting that the overall premise is hard to take seriously, which captures a genuine tension in how to approach Simone’s work. The explicit content in American King is substantial and serves the emotional narrative rather than existing apart from it. The intimacy between Ash, Greer, and Embry in all three combinations has always been Simone’s primary vehicle for expressing what words between characters cannot carry. In book three, when those expressions of intimacy are weighted with impending loss and political stakes, they operate differently than they would in a less architecturally complex romance.
Sophie Eastlake and the Tragic Register
The New Camelot series requires a narrator who can operate in the emotional key of political tragedy while sustaining the erotic charge and never letting either element deflate the other. Eastlake’s performance throughout the twelve-hour runtime manages this balance. Ash’s first-person narration is grand and self-aware and increasingly burdened, and Eastlake renders that combination without either ironic distance or overwrought melodrama.
Entry Requirements and Recommendations
American King is emphatically not a starting point. You need at least a working knowledge of how Ash, Embry, and Greer’s relationship developed across the preceding books for the emotional stakes here to land with any force. But for readers who have made it this far and want to know whether the trilogy justifies its scope: yes, it does. Simone does not flinch from the tragic ending that the Arthurian architecture demands, and the result is a romance that earns the word tragic in the literary sense rather than using it as a synonym for angsty.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I start the New Camelot series with American King, or do I need to read the previous two books?
You need the previous books. American King is a series finale that depends entirely on the emotional history established in books one and two. Starting here will deprive the ending of its impact.
Does the Arthurian framework require familiarity with the legend to appreciate the story?
Knowing the broad strokes of the Arthur myth, the love triangle, the downfall, the inevitable end, will significantly deepen the experience. The tragedy gains weight from readers knowing the shape of the outcome before the characters do.
The series has been described as scandalous, is the polyamorous content central to the story or primarily a backdrop?
The three-person bond between Ash, Greer, and Embry is the structural center of the entire trilogy. The erotic content, the political stakes, and the tragic arc all flow from that relationship. It is not a backdrop.
How does Sierra Simone resolve the Arthurian tragedy in a contemporary setting without it feeling forced?
The political framing, specifically the re-election campaign against Embry, provides the contemporary mechanism for the classical downfall. The tragedy feels earned rather than imposed because Simone has spent two previous books establishing exactly what is at stake.
