The Seventh Queen

In a bid to share my spoiler free thoughts on the electronic advance reader copy I received of The Seventh Queen on NetGalley, I will start by saying: this could have been a trilogy. 

In The Seventh Queen, we are trapped but not grounded. Pinned but never with our backs to the ground. Wriggling, learning, rescuing, sacrificing, portal hoping, espionage plotting, handsome good-for-nothing layabout noblemen conscripting, fiery revelations spilling, negotiating warrior without a sword to wield, politricking, marriage dodging, power hungry and enacting the dissolution of oppression. We are chaos workers.

Having to figure out the age, attachments and chronological order of the Queens we come across felt like a nice spot of puzzle work - as if we were auditioning to join the spy team. There are moments when the blunt wisdom of Ozura is missed, though one also appreciates that Askia herself, stubborn as she may be, is learning on the job despite all odds, and as frustrated and worried as one may be for her, you do have to just follow along, Lady Night help us. 

While I appreciate the effort it took to keep this a duology, considering one of the reasons I started The Frozen Crown was the prospect of enjoying a book that had a clear end in sight -and no sneaky intention of becoming a long winded series- I was very surprised to find myself wishing there was another instalment to come. This is testament to the world Greta Kelly created, with each character having the potential to lend more stories to chapters. 

That said, I miss the time I didn’t get to spend with some characters in The Seventh Queen. I wish some provinces were given more than a hurried update on the state of their affairs and a chance for us to witness the consequences of events that occurred in book one. There were several threads in both books that I felt were left flaying and working against the clock as we were, I certainly missed a lot of people and potential things. There’s a character in The Frozen Crown for instance that I imagined none other than Oscar Isaac playing -were this to ever get a screen adaptation- though by the end of The Seventh Queen, I had to set that dream entirely aside.

A lot of things happen very quickly towards the end. So much so, I found myself going back over sections to try to piece together fragments I had in disarray. Even with the spots of sweet endings Greta Kelly gave, with some satisfactory resolution for themes raised, I miss the trilogy The Warrior Witch could have been.