A review by lassarina
The Queen's Bargain by Anne Bishop
4.0
I shoved this entire book into my brain in the space of five hours (staying up three hours past my bedtime in the process) and forgot about the entire existence of the world for that five-hour span, so in that sense, it was a complete success.
This is a solid continuation of the Black Jewels series. It has all the flaws and strengths of the series. If you love the series, you're likely to love this. If you don't like the series, or find its gendered magic system, sexual politics, particular brand of snark, or various problematic elements not to your taste, you won't like this book. If you like Surreal, Daemon, Lucivar, and Marian, the book is full of them doing all the things they do quite well. There are delightful cameos from other people from previous books. New problems arise and are dealt with, because it's been long enough since Witch that some problems are cycling back, particularly among shorter-lived races.
It's also clearly kicking off a fuller follow-up story; the threads in this one are, on the surface, less dire than the ones in the initial trilogy, and that really works here, because you can only pull off one world-shattering apocalypse per series without getting passe. (I have much preferred the more slice-of-life stuff that has happened after the initial trilogy because I love seeing what happens after the war is won, as it were.)
And now, because my life and my choices are good ones, I am apparently just going to re-read the entire series, because I'm like that.
This is a solid continuation of the Black Jewels series. It has all the flaws and strengths of the series. If you love the series, you're likely to love this. If you don't like the series, or find its gendered magic system, sexual politics, particular brand of snark, or various problematic elements not to your taste, you won't like this book. If you like Surreal, Daemon, Lucivar, and Marian, the book is full of them doing all the things they do quite well. There are delightful cameos from other people from previous books. New problems arise and are dealt with, because it's been long enough since Witch that some problems are cycling back, particularly among shorter-lived races.
It's also clearly kicking off a fuller follow-up story; the threads in this one are, on the surface, less dire than the ones in the initial trilogy, and that really works here, because you can only pull off one world-shattering apocalypse per series without getting passe. (I have much preferred the more slice-of-life stuff that has happened after the initial trilogy because I love seeing what happens after the war is won, as it were.)
And now, because my life and my choices are good ones, I am apparently just going to re-read the entire series, because I'm like that.