Book review: The King-Killing Queen

[nwhiker]

The King-Killing Queen by Shawn Speakman.

In the end, it was just... mediocre.

I had great hopes for this book. It was described as High Fantasy, and yeah, it fits the category, but there was a lot of hype around it and I was looking forward to reading it.

The good: a few of the characters were interesting.

The rest: Where do I even start? Oh wait, I know, I start with adding a spoiler cut!


-- formulaic: it's not quite shepherdess becomes queen, but almost
-- formulaic: mentor dies right away
-- formulaic: hero and friends must cross the country to find [item] that could solve [conflict].
-- characters: a few were interesting. The others? NSM. Caricatures or flat flat flat.
-- carelessness with current culture: sword named Lumière. Sorry, that's a sex-pest Disney candlestick. Really hard to get past that bad imagery, tbh.
-- carelessness with language: another sword is called Bruyère because it was created, essentially, with human flesh and briars. However... in French, bruyère means heather not briar or brambles (that's "ronces"). A much better choice would have been Eglantine for the sword, églantine is rugosa. Dude, a quick jaunt at Bing or Google Translate would have saved you from that jarring and stupid mistake.
-- the writing was... blah, to say the least.
-- there was very little plot (beyond "journey though hostile territory by a group of mostly people") and not enough story for one book, and god only knows what's going to happen with the sequels (which I probably won't be reading). I read in another comment that making it longer but finishing the whole story (and thus cutting a lot of the filler in this one) might have made a tighter book.


So yeah. Mediocre.