2.5 stars
I was intrigued by the mystery presented and the fact that this novel is a standalone fantasy, but unfortunately this was a big let down.
Firstly, I thought the whole presentation of the story felt super off and led to a lot of the book feeling repetitive. Because you go into the book KNOWING the Queens die (It's the literal title for goodness sake), it felt really jarring to have the queen's perspectives at all. At first when I realized that happened I thought oh this is a cool twist, for some reason thinking we'd see their deaths in individual chapters in quick succession. But then we did not, and their perspectives are dragged out through the end. For what reason? We already see how each queen dies by the time we get to their actual deaths from their perspective so it just felt repetitive. This is a small thing, but speaking of repetitiveness, each chapter begins with a rule from "Queenly law" apparently there are only 4 or 5 laws because each one was said over and over to the point of irritation. This was a good opportunity to extend the world building a bit by introducing us to new rules/laws of the world but no instead we just got the same ones over and over.
As for the characters I wasn't a huge fan of them either. The main character, Keralie, did things that made absolutely no sense. Considering that she was just betrayed by her "best friend" of 10 years or so you would think she'd be a little wary of trusting others but Nope! For that reason the romance made no sense, and was completely unnecessary. Varin the love interest was uninteresting to me to be honest, there's nothing about him to note. Each of the four queens were decently interesting, and two of them were actually wlw. However, Once again I knew they were going to die which prevented me from caring about them because I truly didn't think we'd spend as much time with them as we did.
Finally the overall plot was once again lack luster. The mystery was solved in a neat little bow so the resolution wasn't really satisfying at all.
I was intrigued by the mystery presented and the fact that this novel is a standalone fantasy, but unfortunately this was a big let down.
Firstly, I thought the whole presentation of the story felt super off and led to a lot of the book feeling repetitive. Because you go into the book KNOWING the Queens die (It's the literal title for goodness sake), it felt really jarring to have the queen's perspectives at all. At first when I realized that happened I thought oh this is a cool twist, for some reason thinking we'd see their deaths in individual chapters in quick succession. But then we did not, and their perspectives are dragged out through the end. For what reason? We already see how each queen dies by the time we get to their actual deaths from their perspective so it just felt repetitive. This is a small thing, but speaking of repetitiveness, each chapter begins with a rule from "Queenly law" apparently there are only 4 or 5 laws because each one was said over and over to the point of irritation. This was a good opportunity to extend the world building a bit by introducing us to new rules/laws of the world but no instead we just got the same ones over and over.
As for the characters I wasn't a huge fan of them either. The main character, Keralie, did things that made absolutely no sense. Considering that she was just betrayed by her "best friend" of 10 years or so you would think she'd be a little wary of trusting others but Nope! For that reason the romance made no sense, and was completely unnecessary. Varin the love interest was uninteresting to me to be honest, there's nothing about him to note. Each of the four queens were decently interesting, and two of them were actually wlw. However, Once again I knew they were going to die which prevented me from caring about them because I truly didn't think we'd spend as much time with them as we did.
Finally the overall plot was once again lack luster. The mystery was solved in a neat little bow so the resolution wasn't really satisfying at all.