A review by lattes_lipstick_literature
The Queen's Poisoner by Jeff Wheeler

4.0

This book has been on my TBR list for a year and I am so happy that I finally got to read (Listen!) to it. It did start off a little slow which made me weary a bit so I am glad that it ended up picking up and being a interesting book. While the world at first made me a bit confused because what was fountain born, who was this awful king and what the hell is going on? Of course, I blame this partly on the fact that our MC is a 8 year old boy named Owen. While a surprisingly astute and reliable narrator he is ultimately a child so while I may have realized certain things before Owen did I could not blame him for being naive.

The world begins to build itself as the story goes, and there are no long narratives we had to sit and listen to, but Wheeler did eventually end up answering my questions that I had at the beginning. As the story progress I felt myself wanting to play whatever dangerous game was going on, I predicted some things and was glad at how the book ended. The next book The Thief's Daughter makes me wonder what is going to happen as Owen will be much older and after the events of this book, must navigate the dangerous waters of spies and politics.

I wouldn't compare this to the political intrigue of a book like Game of Thrones but it did have more than I thought it would. The fantasy and magic aspect is still a bit confusing for me, and considering that this book was called The Queen's Poisoner I thought it would have much more poison involved in the story. That it why I couldn't give it a higher score than 4, because I still had questions about the world building.

Hopefully Wheeler will answer these questions for me in the next book which I will be reading (when my TBR gets a little smaller)