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emtees's review
adventurous
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
I really loved Queen of Blood, so I was looking forward to the sequel. And The Reluctant Queen was definitely a great book, even if I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the first one.
The story picks up six months after the ending of Queen of Blood. Having survived the Coronation Massacre and become queen, Daleina is now fighting to keep her kingdom and people safe from the constant threat of spirits. Though she is now massively more powerful than she was as a candidate, Daleina started out much weaker than most queens, and she still isn’t up to the normal standard, so she continues to rely on a lot of her old tricks to maintain the balance with the spirits. She is also dealing with doubt about her power in her court and threats from the north, where her old frenemy Merecot is now queen of Semo. But Daleina has another problem - she has contracted a mysterious illness, the False Death. The disease causes victims to “die” for short periods of time, each lasting longer until they eventually die permanently. While this is a personal tragedy for Daleina and her loved ones, it is also a danger to her country, since while she is “dead,” her spirits go wild. And since all her fellow heirs died during the Coronation Massacre, Daleina has no one to step in and take her place. After civilians die during one of her episodes, Daleina sends her Champion, Ven, on a quest to find her an heir who can be trained quickly. In a remote village, Ven encounters Naelin, a middle-aged wife and mother who is gifted with enormous power, but thanks to a traumatic childhood experience hates anything to do with the spirits and refuses to use her power. Naelin cares only about protecting her children and not being separated from them, so Ven has to use some dirty tricks to get her to agree to be trained at all. And Naelin remains adamant that she will not become an heir, never mind a Queen.
Though a number of other characters get POVs, the real hearts of this book are Daleina and Naelin. I continue to adore Daleina as a character. She is young but strong, wise and practical. She cares so much about protecting people, and she feels terrible guilt whenever anything happens to her people that she believes she could have prevented. Her determination and kindness are amazing. As she faces death, her only concern is for what it will mean for her people. The parts of the story that focus on her show her struggling to balance the needs to her threatened people with the desire to keep her illness a secret so they won’t panic, and her efforts to avoid thinking about her personal tragedy and what the loss will mean for loved ones like her lover, Hamon, and her sister, Arin. Meanwhile, Hamon and Arin are on their own quest to save Daleina’s life, helped by Hamon’s, um, psychopathic mother, Garnah. (That plot line was really strange and out of place to me. Garnah is hilarious, so it was entertaining to read her scenes, but I couldn’t really figure out the logic of her presence.Hamon admits that she murders people regularly and even made him help her when he was a kid, and Daleina’s response is basically just “that must have been hard for you.” No “did you ever think about turning her in for, you know, the murders?” No considering that as queen, maybe she should do something about this? When they decide that Garnah should help them find a cure for Daleina, they seem a little worried that maybe she might murder some more people, as if Daleina, as the queen of the whole country, couldn’t do something about this. Not to mention the craziness with her brainwashing Arin and Hamon basically deciding to let that go with a stern warning because he seems unaware that you can do anything else about psycho criminals. ) For me, the biggest weakness of this part of the story, which I otherwise loved, was that we got very little of Daleina’s relationship with her Champion, Ven. They had a few nice moments, but Ven was much more part of Naelin’s story in this one than Daleina’s.
Naelin is the other main protagonist and I didn’t feel the same connection to her that I did to Daleina. She is an interesting character. I really liked that she was an older protagonist - you almost never see fantasy heroes over thirty - and that she was married and a mother. The fact that her marriage is an unhappy one and she and her husband go through a divorce during the story was also really interesting and not something you usually see. I actually liked her kids, Erian and Llor, who have brief POV sections. I also liked that being older than previous heirs and having different experiences made her challenge the way things had always been done - while I enjoyed Daleina’s occasionally life-threatening training in the first book, I also really liked the scene where Naelin flat out refused to have anything to do with Ven’s usual training methods because she wouldn’t have that kind of danger around her kids, and Ven actually listened and adjusted his techniques. And I’m always sympathetic to a character who is being forced into a life that they don’t want. The problem for me, though, was a couple things. First, Naelin’s entire personality seemed to be “mother.” All she ever talked about was her kids. Her only motivation for anything seemed to be related to them. The second was the contrast between Naelin and Daleina: while Daleina was weak in magic but became an heir through her sheer drive to protect others, Naelin is immensely powerful, nearly equal as an heir to Daleina as queen, and yet has no desire to do anything with that power. I appreciated her reasons but it was frustrating to see her refusal to, well, join the plot, and it didn’t make her reflect well as a character in comparison to Daleina. I did enjoy the few scenes the two of them had together, especially the realization that they were both intimidated by the other, but there weren’t enough of those, and whenever we were with Naelin I kept wanting us to go back to Daleina.
As far as that plot, it was really well done. Durst is very good at weaving mysteries into her plot, and as with the first book, there is a twist in this one that I didn’t see coming but, once it did, I realized the clues had all been there. The climax is exciting and full of twists and tension. My only disappointment plotwise was that I was really excited to see Merecot return as an antagonist but she was barely on-page, mostly just a threat from a distance. However, the epilogue made it clear that she will be back in the next one, so I’m looking forward to that.
The story picks up six months after the ending of Queen of Blood. Having survived the Coronation Massacre and become queen, Daleina is now fighting to keep her kingdom and people safe from the constant threat of spirits. Though she is now massively more powerful than she was as a candidate, Daleina started out much weaker than most queens, and she still isn’t up to the normal standard, so she continues to rely on a lot of her old tricks to maintain the balance with the spirits. She is also dealing with doubt about her power in her court and threats from the north, where her old frenemy Merecot is now queen of Semo. But Daleina has another problem - she has contracted a mysterious illness, the False Death. The disease causes victims to “die” for short periods of time, each lasting longer until they eventually die permanently. While this is a personal tragedy for Daleina and her loved ones, it is also a danger to her country, since while she is “dead,” her spirits go wild. And since all her fellow heirs died during the Coronation Massacre, Daleina has no one to step in and take her place. After civilians die during one of her episodes, Daleina sends her Champion, Ven, on a quest to find her an heir who can be trained quickly. In a remote village, Ven encounters Naelin, a middle-aged wife and mother who is gifted with enormous power, but thanks to a traumatic childhood experience hates anything to do with the spirits and refuses to use her power. Naelin cares only about protecting her children and not being separated from them, so Ven has to use some dirty tricks to get her to agree to be trained at all. And Naelin remains adamant that she will not become an heir, never mind a Queen.
Though a number of other characters get POVs, the real hearts of this book are Daleina and Naelin. I continue to adore Daleina as a character. She is young but strong, wise and practical. She cares so much about protecting people, and she feels terrible guilt whenever anything happens to her people that she believes she could have prevented. Her determination and kindness are amazing. As she faces death, her only concern is for what it will mean for her people. The parts of the story that focus on her show her struggling to balance the needs to her threatened people with the desire to keep her illness a secret so they won’t panic, and her efforts to avoid thinking about her personal tragedy and what the loss will mean for loved ones like her lover, Hamon, and her sister, Arin. Meanwhile, Hamon and Arin are on their own quest to save Daleina’s life, helped by Hamon’s, um, psychopathic mother, Garnah. (That plot line was really strange and out of place to me. Garnah is hilarious, so it was entertaining to read her scenes, but I couldn’t really figure out the logic of her presence.
Naelin is the other main protagonist and I didn’t feel the same connection to her that I did to Daleina. She is an interesting character. I really liked that she was an older protagonist - you almost never see fantasy heroes over thirty - and that she was married and a mother. The fact that her marriage is an unhappy one and she and her husband go through a divorce during the story was also really interesting and not something you usually see. I actually liked her kids, Erian and Llor, who have brief POV sections. I also liked that being older than previous heirs and having different experiences made her challenge the way things had always been done - while I enjoyed Daleina’s occasionally life-threatening training in the first book, I also really liked the scene where Naelin flat out refused to have anything to do with Ven’s usual training methods because she wouldn’t have that kind of danger around her kids, and Ven actually listened and adjusted his techniques. And I’m always sympathetic to a character who is being forced into a life that they don’t want. The problem for me, though, was a couple things. First, Naelin’s entire personality seemed to be “mother.” All she ever talked about was her kids. Her only motivation for anything seemed to be related to them. The second was the contrast between Naelin and Daleina: while Daleina was weak in magic but became an heir through her sheer drive to protect others, Naelin is immensely powerful, nearly equal as an heir to Daleina as queen, and yet has no desire to do anything with that power. I appreciated her reasons but it was frustrating to see her refusal to, well, join the plot, and it didn’t make her reflect well as a character in comparison to Daleina. I did enjoy the few scenes the two of them had together, especially the realization that they were both intimidated by the other, but there weren’t enough of those, and whenever we were with Naelin I kept wanting us to go back to Daleina.
As far as that plot, it was really well done. Durst is very good at weaving mysteries into her plot, and as with the first book, there is a twist in this one that I didn’t see coming but, once it did, I realized the clues had all been there. The climax is exciting and full of twists and tension. My only disappointment plotwise was that I was really excited to see Merecot return as an antagonist but she was barely on-page, mostly just a threat from a distance. However, the epilogue made it clear that she will be back in the next one, so I’m looking forward to that.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Terminal illness, Toxic relationship, and Violence
Fantasy violence. A main character is suffering from a terminal illness. A main character is mind-controlled by another character and her friends allow this to continue.