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A review by claudiacantread
The Seventh Queen by Greta Kelly
4.0
3.5/5 rounded up.
So I very much want to chime into the book world and say that this duology (The Frozen Crown being the first!) deserves a bit more attention than its gotten. I hadn’t heard anything about it and just picked it up at a used book sale for a pretty cover. Is this amazing, ground breaking work? No. But it is a LOT better (in my opinion of course!) then a lot of books in the YA/NA fantasy field that seem to get weighed down in attention. Though maybe the no expectations made it better for me? *Shrug* Either way, I look forward to Greta Kelley’s work in the future as she maybe smooths out some of the rough edges from her debut novels.
Now I was super vague in the first book because honestly I liked how twisty the book ended up being for me. This one is less so but I don’t want to spoil anything still especially the ending of the last book. So sorry you don’t really get a summary.
Our main character Askia is back though of course, and I continued to love her. I’m basically a sucker for snark and someone willing to defend others. Our world building expanded and we got a look at other places and the society within them. With that, came new and interesting characters. Kelly is really good at character writing, dialogue, and tension. She slips in rather powerful moments in quiet ones. I absolutely loved and wanted to highlight random lines in the book. ("Only a man would think a woman was safer without her voice," - one I can literally quote just from the top of my head at this point days later).
The big problem with this novel is the pacing though. I don’t know if Kelly was trying to avoid the dreaded ‘second book syndrome’ by creating just two books, but what we ended up with was a book that went slow, slow, slow and then super duper fast. I’m a total weirdo in the book community who LOVES benign world building. You could tell me how taxes work in the society and I would be like huh, cool! The first half of this book is a LOT of that (well ok, not taxes but world building) and political maneuvering and backstabbing and I liked it! buuuut I kept looking at the page count and wondering how on earth it would be wrapped up well enough for satisfaction with less and less time available. I was right to be worried. The fate of two kingdoms is wrapped up in about twenty pages. That’s not enough! And while I understood the reasoning of the ending, I think it wasn’t the best move to have us so separated from characters and places we had already grown attached to. I could have read an entire third book of Askia dealing with all the fallout from this one. We don’t even know the fates of some characters! (….spin off novel?)
But other than that rather glaring problem, I still enjoyed it.
I do hope in the future Kelly gives herself or is given free reign to make the epic political drama/romance I think she is capable of. Because here, I think she was a little hobbled by fitting it into a neat little duology. I will one hundred percent check out her next books.
Also, maaaybe higher a new editor. This was a first edition but I should not be catching misspellings and errors. I'm not that good at grammar (see entire above as proof).
Conversation question: Any favorite underhyped books recently? least favorite overhyped ones?
So I very much want to chime into the book world and say that this duology (The Frozen Crown being the first!) deserves a bit more attention than its gotten. I hadn’t heard anything about it and just picked it up at a used book sale for a pretty cover. Is this amazing, ground breaking work? No. But it is a LOT better (in my opinion of course!) then a lot of books in the YA/NA fantasy field that seem to get weighed down in attention. Though maybe the no expectations made it better for me? *Shrug* Either way, I look forward to Greta Kelley’s work in the future as she maybe smooths out some of the rough edges from her debut novels.
Now I was super vague in the first book because honestly I liked how twisty the book ended up being for me. This one is less so but I don’t want to spoil anything still especially the ending of the last book. So sorry you don’t really get a summary.
Our main character Askia is back though of course, and I continued to love her. I’m basically a sucker for snark and someone willing to defend others. Our world building expanded and we got a look at other places and the society within them. With that, came new and interesting characters. Kelly is really good at character writing, dialogue, and tension. She slips in rather powerful moments in quiet ones. I absolutely loved and wanted to highlight random lines in the book. ("Only a man would think a woman was safer without her voice," - one I can literally quote just from the top of my head at this point days later).
The big problem with this novel is the pacing though. I don’t know if Kelly was trying to avoid the dreaded ‘second book syndrome’ by creating just two books, but what we ended up with was a book that went slow, slow, slow and then super duper fast. I’m a total weirdo in the book community who LOVES benign world building. You could tell me how taxes work in the society and I would be like huh, cool! The first half of this book is a LOT of that (well ok, not taxes but world building) and political maneuvering and backstabbing and I liked it! buuuut I kept looking at the page count and wondering how on earth it would be wrapped up well enough for satisfaction with less and less time available. I was right to be worried. The fate of two kingdoms is wrapped up in about twenty pages. That’s not enough! And while I understood the reasoning of the ending, I think it wasn’t the best move to have us so separated from characters and places we had already grown attached to. I could have read an entire third book of Askia dealing with all the fallout from this one. We don’t even know the fates of some characters! (….spin off novel?)
But other than that rather glaring problem, I still enjoyed it.
I do hope in the future Kelly gives herself or is given free reign to make the epic political drama/romance I think she is capable of. Because here, I think she was a little hobbled by fitting it into a neat little duology. I will one hundred percent check out her next books.
Also, maaaybe higher a new editor. This was a first edition but I should not be catching misspellings and errors. I'm not that good at grammar (see entire above as proof).
Conversation question: Any favorite underhyped books recently? least favorite overhyped ones?