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A review by lanko
The Queen of Blood by Sarah Beth Durst
3.0
A pretty creative world. People in Aratay live in giant trees, building their homes and shops in them. There are even some cities.
There's a constant attrition between humans and spirits of fire, water, ice, air, earth and wood. A coronated Queen gain enough power to order the spirits around, as do other girls. Those are taken to the Academy to be trained as potential heirs to the kingdom in case something happens to the Queen. The spirits are the ones who actually chose among the heirs. And the students who fail can simply be local villages' hedgewitches.
The training is harsh. Students and even teachers can die in the process.
The protagonist is Daleina. She's not brilliant or even average with her magical powers. She's clearly the worst of all the students regarding interactions with spirits. However, contrary to the common loner and brooding protagonist, she's actually a pretty good socializer. And compensates in other areas, like written tests and general knowledge.
Later she manages to interact with spirits much better but still cannot coerce the spirits like all the others.
From the title and blurb everyone can guess what's gonna happen to her. The question that remains then is how it's gonna happen.
There are some mixed feelings about it.
Some intriguing, like the reasons for the current queen to act the way she does. The academy sisterhood. How a weak magician like Daleina is gonna make it. And of course, Queen of Blood. There's Fire, Water, Ice, Air, Earth and Wood. Why blood? What does that mean?
Other aspects didn't make me enjoy it as much as I thought I would. For example, the publisher praises the book for "having the heart of Naomi Novik's Uprooted and the lyricism of Patrick Rothfuss".
And these things they say the book has are exactly the things the book lacked.
First, there are loads of telling and exposition of things that could've been perfectly shown. The writing is pretty simple and straightforward, it gets the job done but in no way it has the beautifully crafted and highly quotable passages like in the books of Novik and Rothfuss.
And this is true even without comparing all three works with each other.
About the telling, this is even more true regarding all the time the character spends thinking how she is weaker than the others, unprepared and so on. This happens beginning to end. And worse, she also sounds way too reasonable and nice about it, even conceding a lot because of it. It made her feel way too righteous. Annoying when we already knew she was indeed gonna be able to influence that spirit, or impress someone, or lead the group or about the final result.
Daleina, Ven and queen Fara are well-built but the other characters are merely passersby.
Which subtracted a lot from the story because the main (at least initial) focus and problem for the protagonist is her period in the Academy, where she makes friends.
Those students may become heirs to the throne. So it would be expected a lot of plotting, backstabbing and aggressiveness, right? No, because being queen here is a heavy burden not easy money, power and glory. So while everybody with magical affinity has to pass through the tests, being queen isn't a position really envied by anyone. So there's no competition or petty games.
Anyway, the story tells (again) how they feel towards each other, but there's no depth and buildup, they are simply names.
I think this is a problem of the initial structure. It begins when Daleina is 10 and her village is attacked. Then she's 14 or 15 and enters the academy. She meets Merecot, who is the arrogant all-powerful magician. They don't really like each other.
Next chapter four or five years had passed and they are pretty much best friends. They're called to the headmistress' room and she says they are cheating in the written tests because their answers are identical. Merecot admits she was the one cheating because she wasn't as good as Daleina on that aspect and because she didn't care for those tests. Then she wishes Daleina well and leaves the academy and the story.
Yes, just like that.
This happens at the beginning and is also the deepest relationship built between Daleina and all the numerous friends she makes at the academy.
Even later when she meets her mentor Ven they don't really have much depth between them. Tree-traveling and knife fight training are quickly assimilated by Daleina.
In some stories those leaps of time work (say, The Black Company) but here it didn't for me.
The threat and mystery of the spirits kept the story going. And then some deaths happen (some are pretty gruesome) and spice things up.
Curiously, while the secondary characters didn't have much development, I still felt some deaths, but not exactly for the characters who died or how the main character felt about it, but more for why they died. By the petty decisions of the queen.
I think this had the potential to be a fantastic story but missed that magical spark. Exactly the thing the books the publisher compared The Queen of Blood to had.
The ending is really good and even a bit harsh on everyone. And a nice way to show us why the title is Queen of Blood.
There's a constant attrition between humans and spirits of fire, water, ice, air, earth and wood. A coronated Queen gain enough power to order the spirits around, as do other girls. Those are taken to the Academy to be trained as potential heirs to the kingdom in case something happens to the Queen. The spirits are the ones who actually chose among the heirs. And the students who fail can simply be local villages' hedgewitches.
The training is harsh. Students and even teachers can die in the process.
The protagonist is Daleina. She's not brilliant or even average with her magical powers. She's clearly the worst of all the students regarding interactions with spirits. However, contrary to the common loner and brooding protagonist, she's actually a pretty good socializer. And compensates in other areas, like written tests and general knowledge.
Later she manages to interact with spirits much better but still cannot coerce the spirits like all the others.
From the title and blurb everyone can guess what's gonna happen to her. The question that remains then is how it's gonna happen.
There are some mixed feelings about it.
Some intriguing, like the reasons for the current queen to act the way she does. The academy sisterhood. How a weak magician like Daleina is gonna make it. And of course, Queen of Blood. There's Fire, Water, Ice, Air, Earth and Wood. Why blood? What does that mean?
Other aspects didn't make me enjoy it as much as I thought I would. For example, the publisher praises the book for "having the heart of Naomi Novik's Uprooted and the lyricism of Patrick Rothfuss".
And these things they say the book has are exactly the things the book lacked.
First, there are loads of telling and exposition of things that could've been perfectly shown. The writing is pretty simple and straightforward, it gets the job done but in no way it has the beautifully crafted and highly quotable passages like in the books of Novik and Rothfuss.
And this is true even without comparing all three works with each other.
About the telling, this is even more true regarding all the time the character spends thinking how she is weaker than the others, unprepared and so on. This happens beginning to end. And worse, she also sounds way too reasonable and nice about it, even conceding a lot because of it. It made her feel way too righteous. Annoying when we already knew she was indeed gonna be able to influence that spirit, or impress someone, or lead the group or about the final result.
Daleina, Ven and queen Fara are well-built but the other characters are merely passersby.
Which subtracted a lot from the story because the main (at least initial) focus and problem for the protagonist is her period in the Academy, where she makes friends.
Those students may become heirs to the throne. So it would be expected a lot of plotting, backstabbing and aggressiveness, right? No, because being queen here is a heavy burden not easy money, power and glory. So while everybody with magical affinity has to pass through the tests, being queen isn't a position really envied by anyone. So there's no competition or petty games.
Anyway, the story tells (again) how they feel towards each other, but there's no depth and buildup, they are simply names.
I think this is a problem of the initial structure. It begins when Daleina is 10 and her village is attacked. Then she's 14 or 15 and enters the academy. She meets Merecot, who is the arrogant all-powerful magician. They don't really like each other.
Next chapter four or five years had passed and they are pretty much best friends. They're called to the headmistress' room and she says they are cheating in the written tests because their answers are identical. Merecot admits she was the one cheating because she wasn't as good as Daleina on that aspect and because she didn't care for those tests. Then she wishes Daleina well and leaves the academy and the story.
Yes, just like that.
This happens at the beginning and is also the deepest relationship built between Daleina and all the numerous friends she makes at the academy.
Even later when she meets her mentor Ven they don't really have much depth between them. Tree-traveling and knife fight training are quickly assimilated by Daleina.
In some stories those leaps of time work (say, The Black Company) but here it didn't for me.
The threat and mystery of the spirits kept the story going. And then some deaths happen (some are pretty gruesome) and spice things up.
Curiously, while the secondary characters didn't have much development, I still felt some deaths, but not exactly for the characters who died or how the main character felt about it, but more for why they died. By the petty decisions of the queen.
I think this had the potential to be a fantastic story but missed that magical spark. Exactly the thing the books the publisher compared The Queen of Blood to had.
The ending is really good and even a bit harsh on everyone. And a nice way to show us why the title is Queen of Blood.