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kassidyreads's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Graphic: Death, Blood, and Death of parent
Moderate: Misogyny and Violence
Minor: Child death, Sexual assault, and War
zaesbookshelf's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Kendare Blake is a master of plot twists, with tiny little surprises sprinkled throughout the story. The multiple plot points going on throughout the story really helps to drive it and keep the reader engaged. Such an absolute fan. Cannot wait to see how this ends.
Graphic: Death, Blood, Murder, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Infertility, Sexual assault, Grief, Death of parent, and Pregnancy
maupi's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
Minor: Sexual assault and Violence
queer_bookwyrm's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Two Dark Reigns by Kendare Blake is book three in the Three Dark Crowns quartet. These books have been pretty consistent with keeping me engaged in the story, and keeps developing the characters. Arsinoe is still my favorite.
We pick up from the cliffhanger of the previous book (possible spoilers for the first two books), and we see Arsinoe, Mirabella, and Billy make it to the mainland. This is a struggle for the sisters going from being treated as queens on Fennbirn in a more equal society to now being in a patriarchal one that doesn't give women freedom. Although they survived the journey, the island is calling them back by sending Arsinoe visions and dreams of the Blue Queen (who turns out to be someone totally different than was recorded in history).
We also follow Jules Milone and her mountain cat familiar as she figures out how to use her newly discovered war-gift in conjunction with her naturalist abilities. On top of this, she is now being coerced into leading the rebellion against Queen Katherine, because the people are sick (no pun intended) of having poisoners on the throne. We finally get some explanation for what happened to Katherine in the Breccia domain, and she stopped being needlessly evil. Turns out she doesn't even have an ability! I stead she borrows from the dead queens that possessed her when she fell into the Breccia Domain .
I love seeing a rebellion! I'm also happy to continue following Jules, because she is awesome. We found out some major twists I wasn't expecting! This series certainly keeps you on your toes! And we are left with another doozy of cliffhanger. Just one book left! I can't wait to see how it wraps up and what happens to Fennbirn.
Graphic: Child death, Self harm, Sexual assault, Violence, Blood, Medical trauma, and Death of parent
mia_luvsreading's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Graphic: Death, Blood, and Death of parent
Moderate: Gore, Sexual assault, and Violence
Minor: Confinement, Infertility, and War
skidderxx's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
one thing i predict for book 4:
Graphic: Gore, Sexual assault, Torture, and War
Moderate: Pregnancy and Fire/Fire injury
emtees's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
We pick up a few weeks after the end of One Dark Throne. Katharine is now queen, but her reign is coming with a lot of problems. She is still possessed by the spirits of the queens who were sacrificed in the Breccia Domain. Pietyr, her lover and greatest supporter (apart from, you know, that one time he murdered her, which the book is now trying to convince us was out of love) wants her to let the queens go now that she’s taken the throne, but Katharine, who has been weak and abused all her life, is reluctant to give up the power they grant her, even as it becomes clear that she doesn’t fully control them. And she’s got other problems too. The mist that protects Fennbirn from outsiders has seemingly turned on the island, killing sailors in gruesome ways and dumping their bodies on the shore. Her reputation as the “Undead Queen” is turning the people of the island against her at the worst time. But Katharine does have some surprising allies in High Priestess Luca, who was convinced to support her reign in exchange for increased political power for the Temple, and even Bree Westwood, Mirabella’s foster sister and a new member of the Black Council. I really enjoyed how Blake handled these relationships and the way she continues to grant sympathy to Katharine. The biggest strength in these books is the way all the characters, even the “evil” sister, are complex and have clear and reasonable motives for how they act. The enemy is always the system they are trapped in rather than the characters themselves.
That system gets challenged in this book, though, through the character of Arsinoe’s foster sister, Jules Millone. In the last book, Jules learned that she was “legion-cursed,” born with two different magical powers and doomed to go mad. For now, Jules’s war-gift is held in check by a low magic spell, but that doesn’t stop the warriors of Bastian City, led by the temperamental Emilia, from claiming Jules as one of their own and trying to push her into fulfilling a prophesy that says she will be a queen. Emilia and her allies among the warriors and oracles, two castes who have been shut out of Fennbirn politics for generations, are convinced that Jules is meant to overthrow Katharine and establish a new, more egalitarian rule on Fennbirn. It sounds great in theory, but Jules is reluctant to start a war on an island that hasn’t seen battle in four hundred years. I really wanted to like this plotline, since I liked Jules in the previous books and I usually enjoy stories about revolutions. But in this case I found the plotline more annoying than not. A big part of this was Jules’s new allies, Emilia and the Oracle Mathilde. In the previous books, Jules had such great relationships with Arsinoe and their allies in Wolf Spring, and it was jarring to see her now with new supporting characters who I just didn’t like as much. Emilia, in particular, was a grating character. Supposedly she cared about Jules, but all we saw her do was push Jules in directions she didn’t want to go, blatantly manipulate her, and constantly threaten to get in fights with people. I don’t like when fantasy stories have a character’s personality determined by the type of magic they do, so I’ve never liked the warriors in these books. This story also had the most inconsistencies in what is otherwise really tight worldbuilding. The prophesy element was weak and not well explained and while I may have misunderstood something, it seemed like the rules around how Jules’s legion-curse and the low magic keeping her sane worked kept changing.
The final plotline centered on Arsinoe and Mirabella, who have escaped Fennbirn and are living on the mainland with Billy’s family, trying to adjust to life in a world with no magic and a lot more sexism than they’re used to. Mirabella is doing okay, but Arsinoe chafes at being told to wear dresses and act “ladylike.” I really wanted to see more of this aspect of the story, but we didn’t actually see much of Billy’s world. The mainland continues to be very vague and blurry to me; it seems to be based on late-nineteenth century Europe, but outside of a few country names, we have no sense of how much land it covers, what the culture is like, even what the name of Billy’s home is. So that was disappointing. However, Arsinoe and Mirabella did end up getting the most intriguing storyline when Arsinoe began to dream about the life of a woman named Daphne, a mainlander who traveled to Fennbirn four hundred years ago. Arsinoe’s dreams set up all kinds of questions about the last Blue Queen of Fennbirn and the mist that protects the island. I figured out what was going on in the dreams pretty early on, but it was still interesting to see. Meanwhile, the girls also begin having visions of the Blue Queen herself, who urges them to return to Fennbirn on a mysterious quest that puts them on a collision course with Jules and Katharine. The relationships between Mirabella, Arsinoe and Billy are some of the most fun in the book, and Fennbirn’s history and mysteries are all interesting, so I enjoyed this plotline. I just wish we could have seen a bit more of the mainland besides Billy’s dining room and one party before they headed back to the island.
Overall, this book was mostly set up for the last book in the series, establishing the rebellion, Arsinoe’s quest, and the new configuration between the three sisters. I’m looking forward to how it all ends, though I’m really worried that it won’t be a happy ending for a lot of my favorite characters.
Moderate: Mental illness, Death of parent, and Pregnancy
Minor: Sexism and Sexual assault
rinku's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Graphic: Death, Blood, and Death of parent
Moderate: Gore, Sexual assault, and Violence
Minor: Confinement, Infertility, and War
emily_mh's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Graphic: Child death, Death, Sexual assault, Violence, Blood, Murder, and Pregnancy
Moderate: Ableism, Animal death, Body horror, Gore, and Injury/Injury detail
Minor: Animal cruelty, Body shaming, Confinement, Infertility, Infidelity, Physical abuse, Sexism, Sexual content, Xenophobia, Vomit, Grief, Death of parent, Fire/Fire injury, Abandonment, Alcohol, and War
librariangeorgia's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Sexual assault, and Blood